If someone offered you $81,000, what would you do?
That small fortune, likely more money than Fiona Crawley had ever seen in her life, was hers. The UNC women’s tennis star had earned it with an unexpected run through U.S. Open qualifying to the tournament’s main singles draw. Though she lost in the first round, the money was on its way.
The catch? Should she accept, she would never play college tennis again. The NCAA bars college athletes from claiming prize money of more than $10,000. Crawley’s senior season – the end of a dominant run of success in the collegiate circuit – would not take place.
So Crawley did what any normal college student wouldn’t. She turned down the money and came back to Chapel Hill.
“The thought of not going back to college didn’t cross my mind,” Crawley told Chapelboro.
Now, with a conspicuously lighter pocketbook, Crawley is ready to help Carolina defend its first-ever NCAA team championship. That title is one more item on a lengthy list of victories and accolades for Crawley during her college career.
ACC Champion.
Three ITA National Team Indoor Championships.
ACC Player of the Year.
National Player of the Year.
Honda Sport Award.
ITA All-American Champion.
ITA Fall Singles (2022) and Doubles (2021) Champion.
NCAA Doubles Champion.
NCAA Team Champion.
The stats don’t lie: Fiona Crawley has seemingly run out of worlds to conquer. So why not take the money and run?
“She loves Carolina. She loves this team. She loves every practice,” said Crawley’s head coach, Brian Kalbas. “If it was a grind, or if she didn’t enjoy being with her teammates and her coaching staff, she’d probably be looking for the next thing.”
Kalbas brought Crawley to Carolina as the top-ranked recruit in the Class of 2020. She was a known commodity in her hometown of San Antonio, having been deemed a prodigy at the ripe old age of 10. Between ages 7 and 9, Crawley took tennis lessons with renowned coach Hiro Kojima in Japan while her father, Peter, was stationed at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. When she got back to Texas, Crawley suffered a nasty bite wound from a neighbor’s dog just three days before an important tournament. She played, and won, anyway. Fiona Crawley was in the fourth grade.
She continued to find success as a high schooler, winning the Girls 16s title at the Billie Jean King National Hard Court Championships and the 18s National Winter Singles championship (a complete itemized list would run off the page) while still representing her high school, Alamo Heights, in team events.
And yet, when she arrived in Chapel Hill, she received a wake-up call.
“I don’t think I really knew how to train until I got to college,” Crawley said. “I didn’t lift weights… going to the gym every day was definitely a change and a step up.”
For Crawley to admit this is no small thing. If dispatches from San Antonio are to be believed, she is also a skilled gymnast and double-black-diamond skier in addition to her phenomenal tennis talent. Her training regimen in the scorching Texas heat – as a 10-year-old! – is enough to make even the most hardcore athletes shudder: eight to 10 hours of practice a week on weekdays and one to four hours a day on weekends. That doesn’t include tournaments – sometimes two at a time – and tennis camps.
All of that, apparently, pales in comparison to what Crawley encountered at Carolina.
“You have to be ‘on,’ and you want to be ‘on’ for everybody else,” she said. “You’ve got to come to practice to make yourself better, but [also] to make everybody else better. My coaches from home would always be like, ‘Learn how to train!’ And I feel like I really figured it out.”
Maybe it was that team-first attitude which made this past summer a particularly challenging one for Crawley. After concluding the college season, she embarked on a summer tour and a foray into the world of professional tennis. In addition to playing matches, Crawley had all sorts of fun new responsibilities: booking her own flights, reserving her own hotels, figuring out her own meals.
“It really woke me up,” she said, “and gave me another level of gratitude for the coaches and the staff and the trainers and the team. We all really are a family. That motivates me so much every day to come out and give my best.”
UNC’s Fiona Crawley is the most decorated active player in collegiate women’s tennis. Now, she’s back for more. (Image via UNC Athletic Communications/Anthony Sorbellini)
“She never – and I said never – has had a bad practice,” said Kalbas. “Maybe she hasn’t been feeling great, but she always puts a smile on her face and tries extremely hard.”
Kalbas described Crawley’s maturity on and off the tennis court as one of her most impressive traits. He noted how, before she sat down to interview for this story, Crawley went out of her way to collect loose tennis balls after a long practice — not normally a task given to your star player.
In Carolina’s early dual matches this winter, Crawley has played No. 2 singles, despite playing No. 1 as the top-ranked singles player in the nation for most of last season. She moved to the No. 2 court last spring after Carolina suffered its only loss of the year, to NC State in the ACC Tournament final.
“She’s super receptive in those pressure situations,” said Carson Tanguilig, Crawley’s doubles partner. “Not all of us are.”
Crawley proceeded to win all her singles matches at No. 2 – and one at No. 3 – in straight sets as the Tar Heels marched to the NCAA Tournament final. As if it was written in the stars, UNC exorcised its NC State demons in the championship, defeating the Wolfpack 4-1 on a sweltering May night in Orlando. It marked the end of a run of brutally close misses for the Tar Heels in the NCAAs: the team had reached the national semifinals in each of the previous three tournaments but never lifted the trophy.
After the controlled chaos of the post-championship celebration ended, Crawley went back to her hotel room and cried.
“It was just so much,” she said. “Everything that we’d been working for, for the past three years. We were so close every time and just missed it. And when we finally did it, it was a surreal experience… when I think back to it, it feels almost like a different lifetime.”
The proofs of it still remain, though. Not just the trophy and the banner; Crawley, Tanguilig and the rest of the roster got matching “23” tattoos to commemorate their accomplishment.
Fiona Crawley won both the team title and the doubles title at the 2023 NCAA Championships. (Image via UNC Athletic Communications/Jeffrey A. Camarati)
And Crawley wasn’t done. As a coda to that cathartic victory, she then won the NCAA doubles title with Tanguilig the next week, clinching an automatic bid to the U.S. Open main women’s doubles draw. Crawley and Tanguilig defeated UNC teammates Reese Brantmeier and Elizabeth Scotty in the championship match.
Of course, Crawley’s goals extend beyond the collegiate circuit. Returning to the U.S. Open main draw would be a good place to start. Outside of the court, though, Crawley is keeping herself busy as an English & Comparative Literature major and Creative Writing minor. One of her favorite classes, she remembered, was an interactive screenwriting course in which the students acted out original scripts (Crawley said the anxiety of public performance didn’t quite match playing in an NCAA final).
This semester, Crawley is taking a “Literature and Cinema” class. Part of the workload includes reading the screenplay for the 2003 Pixar classic “Finding Nemo,” which (brace yourselves) came out the year after Crawley was born. The grown-up jokes and references scattered throughout the film have made reading the screenplay an enjoyable experience.
“I think I’m an adult now,” Crawley added. “I don’t know. Is 21 an adult?”
Grown or not, Crawley will jump into the real world after graduating in May. Next will be a hopefully long career in professional tennis, though even that is fleeting in the bigger picture. Take one of Crawley’s favorite players, Victoria Azarenka of Belarus. Azarenka is 34 – on the older side in the world of sports, but still 23 years younger than Kalbas.
But using a former world No. 1’s career may be slightly hyperbolic. Many pro tennis players retire much earlier due to a number of reasons: lack of funds, injuries or just burning out. Tennis is a cutthroat industry; Cherwell, the student newspaper of Oxford University, reports that 80 percent of the top 1,000 ranked players in the world don’t make enough money to cover their annual expenses. Those expenses can include employing a coach, physical therapist and hitting partner, as well as travel fare to tournaments around the world.
Even players at the top of the sport can decide to hang the racket up early. Another world No. 1, Ash Barty of Australia, shocked the world in 2022 when she announced her retirement a month shy of her 26th birthday. Barty had just won the Australian Open, the third Grand Slam title of her career.
Said Barty in her announcement, “I don’t have the physical drive, the emotional want and everything it takes to challenge yourself at the very top of the level anymore. I am spent.”
Life without tennis eventually comes for everyone who plays the game. So what does that life look like for Fiona Crawley? It’s one question, she said, that consistently scares her.
“I hope that I can find something one day that makes me feel the way that tennis does,” Crawley said. “I don’t think anything ever will, honestly. The way that it’s shaped me into who I am today, I’ll forever be grateful. And honestly, forever be indebted. I don’t think I could ever repay what this sport has given me.”
Tennis has dominated Crawley’s life. In return, she’s dominated tennis. But when she does step away from the court for the final time, Crawley said the field of education is her favored landing spot, crediting her lifelong love of learning to her dad.
For now, though, that passion is what’s driving her in her final college season.
“She still has things in her game she’s working on,” Kalbas said. “She’s a ‘test the water’ type person. She doesn’t jump right in. She has to test the level. Once she realizes what the level is, then she knows how hard she has to work, or the things she has to add to her game. That’s what she’s been able to do this year after having that pro experience.”
And what better place to conduct a tune-up? Crawley’s Tar Heels will head to Seattle on February 9 for the ITA National Team Indoor Championship, where Carolina is the four-time defending champions. No. 1 UNC is 6-0 in the dual match season, already with wins against No. 11 Auburn and No. 3 Georgia under its belt. Crawley has yet to drop a match in singles or doubles.
So the woman who has won everything, the same one who left an astonishing amount of money and an early start to a professional career on the table, somehow has even more to do. Adding even more hardware to the trophy case (and an additional tattoo to her arm) are at the forefront.
There’s also this: as part of her coursework, Crawley has begun to write her memoir. Whether it includes the incident with the dog is yet to be determined.
“If you’re ever in an airport and you see a memoir by Fiona Crawley, pick it up,” she said. “Because I’ve had a crazy f—ing life.”
Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications/Jeffrey A. Camarati
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