Clarkdale resident Andrea Meyer, Mingus Union High School’s girls’ tennis head coach, is among this year’s 17 recipients of the Billie Jean King Champions of Equality Award presented by the United States Tennis Association. Meyer was also named Coach of the Year for Division II, Section II by the Arizona Interscholastic Association.
Meyer is a member of the Southwest Section of the USTA, which covers Arizona, New Mexico and El Paso, Tex. She will be presented with the award on the court during the women’s semifinals of the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, taking place at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York City on Thursday, Sept. 5.
Photo courtesy John Lawler
This is the second year the award has been presented. It is intended to highlight the efforts of women to embody King’s drive to put a tennis racket in everyone’s hand, which Meyer has done by coaching children with special needs and by designing a cardio tennis night for the Clarkdale Police Department. She is also looking for ways to expand the program to other first responders in the Verde Valley.
“She’s just an inspiration as a human. This isn’t just about tennis,” Southwest USTA President Jana Perpich, a frequent doubles partner of Meyer, said. “She’s been involved with tennis in northern Arizona as a player, coach and as a volunteer for our tennis community for decades. She’s just a standout volunteer and an inspiration as a leader … She works in her community, to make everybody around her life’s better … She’s not worried about how many people’s lives she touches, but the ones she does, she makes a difference.”
Meyer, a mother of three, graduated from the University of Arizona in 1982 and 1987 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English education and a minor in athletic coaching and taught English at Mingus Union High School from 1987 until 2017. She took over as head coach from Harriet Foy after she arrived, but then took a hiatus upon the arrival of her third child in 1994 before returning to the head coach role in 2005.
Meyer taught a number of honors and pre-Advanced Placement English classes and said she especially loved the way those courses allowed her to discuss personal integrity and decision-making through fiction.
“Many of the works that we taught at Mingus were really valuable to kids, like ‘“Master Harold” … and the Boys,’ ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ they are classics, because you can see yourself as a character, at nine years old or 45 years old, trying to decide what’s the moral path? And and what if there are two right things? What if there’s one thing that’s more right than another? … The presentation of those arguments is what English teaching is all about.”
“Tennis is really played largely from the neck up,” Meyer said. “So all those dilemmas about how to have confidence in yourself, how to manufacture that, when everybody outside of the fence is not wearing [your school colors] … and you have the crowd outside the fence not cheering for you. What personal resources do you have when you have a close line call? Those kinds of things happen in literature and they happen in real life. You’re faced with them when you’re a 14-, 15-year-old tennis player. And so tennis is endlessly rich in those moral, ethical and character dilemmas.”
Meyer attributed her appetite for reading to her mother, who is now 102, was a nurse during World War II and encouraged her to read the biographies of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton.
“‘A Charmed Life’” is what Meyer said she would title her autobiography. “Because everything, even the hard times, even being a single parent has afforded me extraordinary friends who gave me new perspectives, who gave me opportunities … For [a] painfully shy kid who had so much fire in her, so much ambition, and was so stymied by shyness and a very quiet presence, I really have had so much opportunity come my way because of tennis, and because of my friendships and because of the people who coached me. I’ve been endlessly supported at Mingus Union High School … I’m the recipient of so much richness. And when I walk out on a tennis court, sometimes my breath is regularly taken away.”
“[King] was at the vanguard of that movement to equalize purses in the major tournaments and getting the Women’s Tennis Association as a stronger body,” Meyer explained. “Later in life, she has been working for LGBTQ opportunities and equality. So anything that’s grassroots, gets down to giving people rackets so that they have an avenue for their competitive spirit, and so they have an avenue to test themselves against obstacles. That’s what Billie Jean does.”
While not an autograph chaser, Meyer said that she looks forward to drinking her diet root beer at a meet-and-greet cocktail hour at the U.S. Open and telling King “what she meant to me as a 13-year old and watching her carve out places for women.”
Tennis “set me free” Meyer said, and credited Pat Vold, her high school tennis coach at Cholla High School in Tucson, a five-gallon bucket of balls, a wooden Chris Evert racquet and the June 23 signing of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 for doing so.
“In the fall of 1972, Title IX was two months old,” Meyer wrote in her essay for the award. “I was a 13 [year-old], 5’10, painfully shy tomboy with bangs cut too short by my father with a pair of sewing scissors. But I had a wild appetite for … any kind of sport.”
Although Meyer originally wanted to play basketball or baseball after watching her brother’s Little League games, “on my first day of freshman year at Cholla High … the announcement came over the PA,” Meyer wrote. “‘All freshman girls wanting to try out for the tennis team, report to the courts after school’ … I had promised myself that the first sport that was offered for girls, I would do.”
Twenty minutes later, with an aching wrist, she was in love with the sport.
Meyer said one of her biggest points of pride in her 30 years of coaching at Mingus is having a not-cut tennis team, adding that she understands what it feels like to be on the sidelines pre Title IX.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a coach, it’s the kid that you want to cut the first day, it’s the kid you want to cut on the 14th day, because they still haven’t hit the strings, it’s those kids that are your toughest students,” Meyer said. “Because they don’t have the discipline, or they have not played sports before. They don’t look graceful. They may not have any confidence in themselves. It’s those kids that, at the end of the season, they’re the ones that I’m glad that I didn’t cut, and they’re the ones that have made me a better coach.”
“She’s just a really nice person and a wonderful person to work with,” student Jayce Lawler said. “Very kind, sweet, caring, understanding as well. And just a really good person, as a mentor and teacher to help you.”
