BATON ROUGE — LSU women’s tennis head coach Tony Minnis announced the hire of Lisa Jackson as the new assistant coach for the Lady Tigers on Thursday.
Jackson comes to Baton Rouge from UL-Lafayette, where she served as the Ragin Cajuns’ women’s tennis coach for two years.
“She was the head coach at ULL, so she will bring that added experience of being a head coach,” Minnis commented on his new assistant. “She has a lot of enthusiasm, and the work ethic she brings is going to be a real positive for our program. We’re very fortunate at this late date to have found somebody like this.”
In her first year there, the Johannesburg, South Africa, native led the UL-Lafayette tennis team to a 7-14 record, a vast improvement from the team’s 1-13 finish a year before. In 2005, she went even beyond that, leading the team to a 10-9 finish, its first winning season since 2001.
“I think one of the things that was so impressive and one of the major reasons I looked to hire her was what she was able to do at Lafayette,” Minnis explained. “We competed against ULL the past couple years and saw the major improvement in the team and how much better they got in that short time span. I was very impressed with what she did for that program.”
As a player, Jackson began her career at William Carey College in Gulfport, Miss., where she played from January of 1997 to August of 1998. While there she was selected to the NAIA second team All-America and was also the MVP of her team.
After a year she decided to transfer and made the move to the other side of Louisiana where she played for the University of Texas at Arlington for the remainder of her collegiate career. Her impressive career there included earning a top-30 national ranking in doubles, becoming a two-time recipient of the Southland Conference Player of the Year Award in 1999 and 2000 and helping her team win the Southland Conference Championship all three years.
There Jackson also earned both her bachelor’s (2001) and master’s (2003) degrees in psychology. She stayed on staff at UT-Arlington as a graduate assistant with the tennis program until earning her master’s degree.
Jackson said she is eager to work with Minnis and to be a part of a great LSU women’s tennis program.
“I’m excited to be able to work with Tony, a coach with unbelievable experience,” she said. “I think this team’s going to have a great year, and I’m glad I will get to be a part of it.”