For senior Ryann Foster, the journey to become the captain of the LSU women’s tennis team was filled with transformation, acceptance and a relentless work ethic, and it was all made possible through the never-ending support of her family.
Foster first picked up a racquet around the age of eight under the tutelage of her mother Laura, a former collegiate tennis player. By the age of 10, Foster had played in her first tournament.
After splitting time between soccer, basketball, lacrosse and dance, Foster chose to focus solely on tennis at the age of 12. Her parents were committed to giving her every opportunity to chase her dreams and with that came a lot of sacrifice. They would drive three hours through traffic before or after full workdays of their own to allow her to train in New York City. Eventually, they would make the ultimate sacrifice of temporarily splitting up their family to allow her to move to Florida with her mother to train in a more full-time setting while attending high school online via Broward Virtual School.
“I wouldn’t be where I am today without the sacrifices my family has made, between my parents and brother, Rob,” Foster said. “I’m incredibly grateful for everything they have done for me to allow me to be where I am today. My coaches over the years, including Lee Hurst, Tim Mayotte, Marc Leflere, Matt Bocko and Gerrit Disbergen, are also monumental people who have helped and made sacrifices for me over the years and I couldn’t be more thankful for them as well.”
Foster moved to Florida at 14 years old and began a rigorous training regiment that lasted for seven hours a day, six days a week. She began competing in pro events across the world at the age of 15 and travelled as far as Columbia, Peru and Greece.
By her junior year of high school, Foster began gaining notice from several Florida schools to play at the collegiate level. After a few phone calls from her coaches, Foster was visiting Ivy League universities and receiving interest from colleges all over the country.
“Being from the Northeast, the schools that are always talked about in high esteem are the Ivies so I did spend a lot of time visiting those schools,” Foster said. “But as the recruiting process went on, my focus shifted to some big time athletic schools in the Big 12 and SEC.”
Foster ultimately decided on the University of Texas, where she spent her freshman season before deciding to transfer and continue her college tennis journey at a new location.
After she announced her desire to join a new tennis program, Foster began receiving interest from a new set of coaches, including LSU women’s tennis co-head coach Julia Sell, essentially starting the recruiting process all over again.
“I hadn’t really looked into her until I heard she was transferring,” Sell said. “I called around and looked at a lot of video of her and went from there.”
Foster weighed her decision after narrowing down her next step to a few schools, but Baton Rouge was the place that stood out to her the most thanks to the coaching staff at LSU.
“It was definitely the combination of Julia and Mike (Sell),” Foster said. “They were the coaches that I wanted to work with the most. They seemed the most aligned with where I wanted to go with my tennis.”
Working on improving her individual game was a huge selling point for Foster, and she knew that the Sells would be the ones to take her game to the next level.
“They were extremely flexible with working with me on my individual needs,” Foster said. “One of the things about college tennis is it’s a strong team mentality and players can lose sight of what makes them tick as an individual. I think Mike and Julia are better than most at looking at us as individuals and how to help us continue to improve.”
Transferring from one university to another is a drastic transition to make, even more so for a student-athlete, and Foster felt the effects of that initial readjustment at first.
“My transition was not very easy, coming from a school where I had already spent a year and had gotten comfortable there and moving to a new city with new coaches and a new team,” Foster said.
Despite a series of new, unfamiliar surroundings and the task of figuring out how to fit in with a new set of teammates, Foster made an immediate and substantial impact on the Tigers in the 2015-16 season.
“Ryann has a big, dominant game, so she came in and helped us immediately,” Sell said. “She’s a very hard worker, she’s very self-motivated, and she’s very organized. She takes care of everything on and off the court. The way she’s an example to others, it was great for our team. She had a natural leadership, maybe not a role she wanted but something that happened naturally because of her organization and work ethic. That kind of behavior is infectious on a team, and that’s the type of attitude she brought to us immediately.”
Foster kicked off the 2016 dual season with a 15-match win streak that included three wins over ranked opponents. Foster played mainly on courts three and four in singles and formed LSU’s No. 1 doubles pairing along with partner Joana Valle Costa. Foster ended her sophomore season with the most doubles wins and the second-most dual singles wins on an LSU team that competed in the ITA National Indoor Championships for the first time in program history and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Going into her junior season, Foster felt a new sense of confidence after such a strong introduction in the Purple and Gold, and her second season with the Tigers was even more prolific than the first.
“Junior year was the first year where I was coming back to the same school,” Foster said. “I knew everybody, and I understood what it was like to go through a full season. Coming back I was like, ‘I got this, I know what it’s all about.’”
Before the start of the 2016-17 season, Foster was named captain of the LSU women’s tennis team. Playing across courts two and three, she led the team with 27 total singles victories and was ranked as highly as the No. 65 singles player in the country.
For the second year in a row, Foster led the team in doubles wins playing alongside Valle Costa on court one, and the duo qualified for the NCAA Doubles Championships at the end of the season. Foster and Valle Costa tallied four ranked doubles wins in the regular season and added on three more ranked wins at the NCAA Doubles Championships, reaching the semifinal round as part of the deepest postseason doubles run in LSU women’s tennis history.
“Jo (Valle Costa) and I worked really hard that season to improve as a doubles team,” Foster said. “We put ourselves in a position to succeed and everything kind of lined up for us in the end where we were able to flow through and do really well. It’s one of both of our favorite moments from college tennis.”
After her remarkable junior campaign, Foster immediately began preparing to make the most of her third and final season at LSU.
“My goal in preparing for my senior year was just to set myself up to be as successful as possible,” Foster said. “I wanted to make sure I was as fit as I could be to allow myself a chance to play high in the lineup and do well.”
After losing five players from the previous season, a young 2017-18 Tigers squad would lean on Foster for leadership like never before.
“It’s never easy being the lone senior on a team,” Sell said. “For her, she leads more by example. You see the work ethic and the self-motivation. Ryann is always on time, she always takes care of her schoolwork, her racquets are always strung, she always has the right clothes and she knows what our schedule is. She’s always organized, even with the little things like that, and that itself is leadership that helps the whole team stay together.”
Foster had a scorching fall campaign to kick off her senior season, picking up a career-best singles win over No. 23 Johnnise Renaud of Georgia Tech at the Tiger Fall Classic and reaching a career-high singles rankings of No. 64 in the country.
Now more than halfway through the spring season, Foster currently sports a 9-1 dual season record playing primarily at court one for the Tigers, showing why she deserves to play at the top spot in the toughest conference in collegiate tennis.
“To be captain and playing on court one for my senior year I would say is a result of all my hard work over the previous years,” Foster said. “This is such an amazing team where anyone can play any spot and I think that’s the magic of us, just the amount of potential we have.”
With three straight years of top-10 recruiting classes, the Tigers’ 12-4 start to the season is thanks largely in part to this year’s strong freshman class that has Foster excited about the future of the program.
“It’s exciting as a senior to know that next year and the years to come, the team is going to be very successful because of the players we have and the recruiting classes we have,” Foster said. “It’s nice to know that you’re leaving your own legacy behind but that the future is still going to be really special.”