By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE – Was Bar Botzer destined to be a Wahoo? Maybe so, but he followed a long and unconventional path to the University of Virginia, where he’s a first-year student in the Darden School of Business.
On the junior tennis circuit, Botzer competed against and became friends with such players as Thai-Son Kwiatkowski, Luca Corinteli, Mac Styslinger and Alexander Ritschard, all of whom would end up at UVA.
This was a decade ago. On his Facebook page, Botzer said, there’s a chat thread from 2011 in which Corinteli talks up the Cavaliers’ program.
“He’s like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to come to UVA. It’s a great team, it’s a great school,’ “ recalled Botzer, a native of Israel who grew up in Tel Aviv. “And I was like, ‘I’m going to go to the military. It’s not really applicable for me.’ It’s funny how things turned out. I started college when those guys were already done.”
Military service is compulsory for most Israelis, and after graduating from high school Botzer served in the Israel Defense Forces from November 2012 to November 2015. When he left the military, he still had aspirations to play tennis in the United States, and in the summer of 2017 he enrolled at Wake Forest as a 23-year-old freshman.
He made an immediate impact. In 2017-18, Botzer posted a 36-7 record in singles to help the Demon Deacons win the NCAA team title. In 2018-19, he advanced to the round of 16 in the NCAA singles tournament before withdrawing because of an injury, and in 2019-20, playing No. 1 singles for Wake, he was 18-8 when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States and college sports shut down.
Botzer, who had a 3.9 grade-point average, earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from Wake in December 2020. Knowing he would graduate midyear, he had opted out of playing in 2020-21 and, because of the COVID-19 waiver granted to student-athletes by the NCAA, had two seasons of eligibility left.
After being accepted at Darden, one of the nation’s most prestigious business schools, Botzer decided to use them at UVA, where he began a two-year MBA program last semester.
“It’s been going well,” Botzer said. “Darden’s definitely been tough, tougher than I think what we expected, me and the coaches and the team. But at the same time I think we’re done with the most difficult part, which is the first semester, and I think from around March things will calm down significantly. But I enjoy it a lot. I’ve got great classmates, great professors, school’s amazing. I’m very lucky to be where I am.”
The 6-foot-1 Botzer was a welcome addition a tennis program that advanced to the NCAA tournament’s round of 16 last season.
“In a lot of ways, I look at Bar as an extension of the coaching staff,” said Andres Pedroso, UVA’s director of tennis. “He’s been invaluable when it comes to sharing his experiences that he’s had in college tennis––the wins and the losses, the good times and the bad times––and he’s been great at communicating it with the guys.
“He’s also a very, very smart tennis player. And so he’s very good at reading the game and understanding people’s games, and I’ve learned that he’s a great communicator.”
The sixth-ranked Hoos will host the ITA Kickoff Weekend tournament Saturday and Sunday on the indoor courts at the Boar’s Head Resort. Botzer is 11-3 in 2021-22 but acknowledges his game is not where he wants it to be.
“I really want it to be in a specific place,” he said, “where it was when I was at Wake and felt really confident and won a lot of matches. So I really want it to be there as fast as possible, but the coaches give me full support and are trying to remind me [to be patient]. They know everything that I’ve gone through, being away from the game and having Darden take its toll on me in the fall way, way, way more than I thought it would. I worked really hard over winter break and I’m in a good place, bearing in mind everything else that’s going on, but definitely there’s a lot more room to grow. Luckily the season is long, and as long as I’m performing in April and May, that’s all I care about.”
Such rust is to be expected, Pedroso said.
“He didn’t play a competitive match for over a year, and for a tennis player that’s a long time,” Pedroso said. “And so it’s going to take him some time to find himself out there again. He’s been doing it little by little since he started here in September, and it’s a gradual process that he’s working through with the way he trains and the way he lives his life off the court, the way he thinks on the court. And if there’s one thing about Bar Botzer, it’s that he loves to compete.”
Over the years, many former UVA student-athletes have returned to Grounds to attend Darden. Botzer, however, is believed to the first student-athlete to compete for one of UVA’s varsity teams while enrolled at Darden.
“Now that we’ve experienced it, we have a true appreciation for how hard it is to juggle both, because Darden is so demanding,” Pedroso said. “It’s such an all-encompassing experience, that to combine that with being a student-athlete is a huge challenge.”
Botzer noted that “the programs are not designed to work with each other. It’s not like undergrad where you have constant communication between the school and the athletic department. So, it’s learning on the fly for me, for the coaches, for the school. I know the coaches are working really, really hard on making things work, especially now that the spring is coming up. I want to play in all the matches, I want to help the team, I want to be able to give back on the court with everything they’re giving me every single day, both coaches and teammates.”