Major: Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)
Year: Senior
Age: 21
Zodiac Sign: Pisces
Hometown: Solihull, England
Favorite food: “In England, we have, on a Sunday, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding… It’s unbelievable.”
Tom has been representing Pepperdine on the men’s tennis team for nearly four years. He chose to attend university in lieu of going pro at 18 and came to Pepperdine in Spring 2014. He said his parents advised him to get a degree and to pursue going pro after he graduated. “I spoke to a lot of coaches who contacted me via Facebook [and said things like], ‘I’ve seen your results, would you be interested in playing college tennis?’ And the reason I started in the spring was because I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to come, and then it was a last minute thing,” Tom said. He said that he kept getting injured at the time and thought it best to choose attending university at that point. He was considering a few different schools in several places throughout the country before deciding on Pepperdine. “I visited four or five schools, and Pepperdine was the one school I didn’t visit, and that’s the school I ended up in,” he said.
Although he loves the school now, he said he had a tough time his first semester. “Tennis is a very individual sport, you play for yourself, and then you come to play college tennis and it’s suddenly a team environment. Obviously, I think, if you’re a soccer player, you’re used to being on a team, and when you come to college tennis and you have your teammates, you have to look out for each other and support each other; if you’re not used to that, it’s difficult. It was definitely something that took a lot of time for me [to get used to]. I had also been out of education for such a long time, so I was nervous about that. I obviously did school, but it was online school, and I could kind of do it whenever I wanted, so I was nervous about how I’d settle in… And our season starts in January, and I started in January; everything was so difficult, that it was just the worst semester I’ve ever had. But you learn from it, and it just helps you all the time. Looking back, I think I had to go through that and now it’s easy.”
Tom mentioned that his teammates have helped get him through some tough times during his time at Pepperdine. He also said he appreciates his teammates and the dynamic of a team now that he’s been playing with them for a few years. “This is my fourth year doing it, so I’m used to being part of a team. And I’m trying to help the younger guys settle in… I’m trying to make a good effort of being a senior who looks out for the freshmen, and I know that if they can be settled in as well as possible, as fast as possible, then it gives us the best chance of having a good year and a good season. I have good feelings about this year, and I think when you have seniors who have completely bought into the program, there is me and two other guys, I think that positive attitude is spread across the whole team.”
His opinion of Pepperdine as an athlete? “I think it’s unbelievable. It’s obviously a small school, so you get to meet everybody, and I think the fact we don’t have a football team is actually really good, too because I don’t think any team on campus feels like they are above another team, and I think everybody gets on really well. Even athletes and non-athletes, I don’t think anybody looks at each other like, ‘I’m better than you because I’m an athlete,’ I feel like at Pepperdine, everyone’s in it together and they look out for each other and I think that’s good.”
Tom also said that his transition into the Malibu culture coming into Pepperdine was made easier by the fact that he was already familiar with American culture (he lived in Florida for four years between the ages 10-14). “I’m lucky that in England we speak English, as well, it’s not a completely different culture; I know some of my teammates who are from South America, for them it’s very different, but for me, I had also lived in the U.S. when I was younger to play tennis so I kind of knew what it would be like. It is very difficult not to find living in Malibu an amazing lifestyle.”
He has definitely come a long way from that first semester, and is even part of the Waves Leadership Council now, which is a group that consists of several Pepperdine Athletics teams’ leaders and serves the purpose of finding ways to get the student community more involved. Tom is passionate about sports and wants to continue to have tennis be a great aspect of his life post-graduation. “I’m going to play. I’m going to go back home, and just travel, especially around Europe and just compete; I’ll probably give myself a few years because you can’t expect results right away and just see how I do. I’m lucky that my parents persuaded me to come to the U.S. because I have a backup, so it’s not like I’m playing with a lot of pressure.” He said that if playing professionally doesn’t work out, he wants to pursue a career in sports management or sports reporting, but definitely something sports-related.