Dowd is still a player

The Penn women's tennis coach hasn't lost his professional game. It was the way fellow freshman Rena Borromeo had planned it --Ehitting the forehand to Esterowitz's weaker backhand -- and now the ball was going to land softly in the deepest part of the backcourt with plenty of time for her to hustle back and get behind it. She reared back at that moment with the opportunity that comes so infrequently to players of a coached team. Although she did not admit it later, it might have been the tension of having such a chance that was weighing on her mind when she mis-hit what would normally be an easy shot. The ball landed softly over the net, and Esterowitz's doubles partner for the day made a move to reach the softly hit ball before it could bounce twice in front of him. But to the luck of Borremeo, who would like to have had the same outcome but with a harder hit shot, his effort would be to no avail. Although it was apparent that the heart of her coach, Mike Dowd, wanted to reach the ball, something would not let his legs move fast enough to get to it. Dealing with slower legs is one of the changes Dowd has had to confront since leaving the ranks of players to accept the two coaching positions he has held at Penn since beginning two years ago. More important than the reduction in his court coverage, Dowd has begun to look at the game in a different way. "Yeah, a year ago I would have looked at things a little more like a player," said Dowd, when asked if he will remember any of his playing days with George Washington this weekend when he returns to the familiar Princeton courts for the ECAC Tournament. "But now things are a little different." Different, indeed, because in the short time Dowd has been at Penn, he has gone from an assistant, not willing to relinquish the idea of playing professionally, to a head coach with a 12-5 record in dual meets. "This is a big tournament this weekend," he said, still speaking like a coach. "It will determine the ranking for the spring season and go a long ways toward the NCAAs and confidence for our team." To get such coaching concepts as "team confidence" and "rankings" to replace thoughts about his own overhead and serve was not such an easy task for Dowd. "He was always talking about playing," Penn men's coach Gene Miller said of Dowd during his first year at Penn. "He wanted to be out on the circuit." The circuit, however, was where Dowd had just came from when he arrived in West Philadelphia. After a successful career as the No. 3 singles player for George Washington -- Miller said he never lost to Penn during his time there -- he set out on the minor league tennis circuit. "Me and a friend would go from place to place," Dowd said of weeks that would take him up and down the East Coast. "It was tough playing against people where a salary was on the line." But after a year-long career where the hope of playing in major tournament seemed to get farther and farther away, Dowd decided to go back to what he had grown up on. Both of his parents are tennis coaches at Catholic University in Washington, and Dowd remembers the days spent going to his three sisters' matches while they were playing for his parents. "Watching them taught me so much about coaching," he said. "It gave me a way to stay in the game." Watching Dowd yesterday, it became obvious that the player isn't as far away from the coach as his return to that initial shot from Borremeo would have you believe. Borromeo later hit another soft drop shot to Dowd --Ethis time intentionally -- and after walloping it back into the middle of the court, Dowd pumped his arm like Kirk Gibson did while rounding the bases after a World Series home run. Sort of like a player would.