In 1988, before his illustrious coaching career spanning three and a half decades, Bruce Berque, then a recent college graduate from Haverford College in Southern Pennsylvania, decided he wasn’t quite ready to leave the sport he loved.
After leaving the court as a Division III tennis player, he immediately returned to the concrete as an assistant coach of Haverford’s women’s tennis team. Throughout his playing career, he discovered his knack for teaching the game and connected with some of the nation’s best coaches, which helped him eventually move to the Division I ranks.
“Aside from competing in tournaments in the summers, I’d always worked by teaching a lot,” Berque said. “I was pretty fortunate to be around some pretty good coaches who were in college coaching.
Following 10 seasons at Michigan from 2004 to 2014, his first head coaching job, Berque arrived in Austin as a volunteer assistant coach and became associate head coach under Michael Center within a year.
Then the unthinkable happened: Center was arrested by the FBI in connection to the infamous “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal in the middle of the 2019 season, pushing Berque into the interim head coaching role in March 2019.
Despite the turmoil, he led the Longhorns to a 15-2 record to end the season, including a regular season Big 12 title and the program’s first National Championship in 2019. By late May, Berque was named both Big 12 Coach of the Year and Texas’ permanent head coach.
Under Berque’s leadership for the past five seasons, the Longhorns have enjoyed continued success with three NCAA Final Four appearances, more than any other program in that span. However, the program’s sustained winning isn’t the only selling point Berque uses to persuade recruits from across the world to bring their racquets to the Forty Acres.
“We’re one of the few programs in the country that can truly say they check every box,” Berque said. “We have great support, great facilities, great human resources, like a strength coach, medical staff and all kinds of support staff to help make it easier for us to do our jobs.”
However, the team’s cohesion is perhaps the most important asset available to Berque when recruits visit Austin.
“I think the biggest selling point that we have is the culture we have on the team,” Berque said. “When the recruits spend a lot of time with the players, they usually find it’s a good fit or a place they want to be.”
The team’s togetherness is one of many reasons Berque believes the program could reach the pinnacle of collegiate tennis for the second time in six years.
“I think this is really a pretty generational team, a generational group of guys with their level,” Berque said. “I mean to have two number one players at the same time, and the number one junior (tennis player) in the world at the same time and to go as deep as we do. It’s pretty special.”
Eliot Spizzirri has been the top-ranked singles player in the nation since last season and Micah Braswell, nationally ranked third in singles, extended his 29-match winning streak on Sunday. Gilles-Arnaud Bailly, who arrived in Austin in January, is ranked 40th in singles play, but the former No.1 junior player in the world has amassed an impressive 13–3 record making him a contender for Big 12 Freshman of the Year.
Following senior night on April 13 against Baylor, Texas’ final Big 12 tournament campaign will begin on April 19.
