To be a tennis coach at an NCAA member institution, you have to love the sport, says Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Executive Director David Benjamin -- and it doesn't hurt if you were once a student-athlete yourself.

Benjamin, who was a member of Harvard University's tennis team in the 1960s and head coach at Princeton University for 26 years, believes that many former student-athletes are drawn back to the game that gave them so much -- even if being a coach was never high on their list of possible career paths.

The pull has been irresistible for many former student-athletes -- in fact, according to the ITA, 16 women who were ranked in the top 100 Division I players in 1999 are now serving as head coaches, assistant coaches or volunteer coaches at NCAA member institutions. Some, like former University of Florida player and current Temple University head coach Traci Green, always had an idea that coaching was in their blood. Others, like Green's childhood opponent Kathy Sell, who played at Duke University and now is head coach at Princeton, said coaching was not supposed to be part of the plan. Sell finished the 1999 season ranked 77th, while Green finished 47th.

"It was probably the career path I was most resistant to," Sell said. "Within a year, even six months, I just really started missing the college-sport experience. I missed being part of a team. It wasn't even the competition so much as it was having something that I was really passionate about and something I was committed to on a daily basis."

Benjamin said that when he finished his NCAA career, he wasn't necessarily opposed to coaching, but it wasn't high on his priority list, either. He was doing postgraduate work at Harvard, teaching classes and serving as a tennis instructor at a Philadelphia tennis club when an opening came at Princeton for a tennis and squash coach. He interviewed and accepted the position for what he thought would be a two-year stint. He also continued teaching courses in American literature.

"I realized I was able to be more of a 'teacher' as a coach than giving a seminar once a week for 10 people or giving a lecture class," he said. "I felt there was a lot of feedback, and I spent a lot of time with the players. You really get to know the people very well and hopefully have a positive impact on their lives, not just in helping them to play a sport better, but also to help them when they have problems."

Patty McCain, head coach at the University of Washington and the 1987 NCAA singles champion from Stanford University, said she never envisioned herself taking a coaching position -- she felt she was too "feisty, passionate, intense and impatient" to take the time necessary to nurture young players. But her husband, Scott McCain, her coach on the Women's Tennis Association tour and the former University of California, Berkeley, men's tennis coach, inspired her to join the coaching ranks.

For Green, whose mother coached lacrosse at a Division I institution, playing a role in the lives of her student-athletes is what makes her job worthwhile.

"The best thing about my job right now is to be able to touch the lives of so many young people, trying to make them better people on and off the tennis courts," she said.

Janet Bergman, who finished the 1999 season ranked 49th, is the assistant coach at her alma mater, Wake Forest University. Bergman became an assistant so quickly after graduating that there were still several young women on the team who had been her teammates just a few years earlier. What could have been an awkward situation was actually quite smooth because of the patience, attention and positive attitude the student-athletes displayed.

Bergman said her experience as a student-athlete helps her to teach her players to take advantage of their college years.

"I would love to be a collegiate athlete for the rest of my life, and I guess another reason why I went into collegiate coaching is because this is the closest can get to being a student-athlete again," she said. "I know I took a lot of it for granted at times, but I just hope to help other student-athletes to really appreciate everything they are handed as well as to take advantage of all their resources."

For Kathy Sell, her "near-perfect" student-athlete experience has woven its way into her coaching philosophy.

"I expect a lot out of them and I want to push them hard because I know that anything they put into it is going to give them back so many more rewards than any kind of sacrifice or pain of having to give something else up along the way," she said. "It's easy for me to push somebody really hard because ultimately the whole experience in and of itself is fun. I hope to at least offer to the players who go through this program the chance to have the near-perfect experience that I felt I had."

According to Benjamin, past players like Sell and the others can build on their experiences, and it often makes them better coaches because they know what to expect out of many situations a student-athlete will encounter -- they've been there, and they know how to handle it.

"You know what it's like to lose, you know what it's like to win and you know what it's like to change a game plan in the middle," he said. "You've gone through this kind of thing, you've digested it, and you've assimilated and figured out a system.

"It's a mind-set and an attitude that players who are successful have in common. If they're not good competitors and they can't figure things out and solve problems on the court -- if they're not willing to persevere -- then they're usually not going to end up getting where they are."