Alumni Spotlight: Cindy Brinker Simmons

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The University of Virginia women’s tennis team is using its off weekend before the start of the NCAA tournament to gather for a much-loved event.

The Cavaliers’ annual awards banquet is Saturday at the Rotunda, where one of the program’s most distinguished alumnae, Cindy Brinker Simmons, will present the award for the team’s most improved player. Brinker Simmons, who lives in Dallas, has done so since early in Sara O’Leary’s tenure as head coach.

“It just felt so fitting with the way she takes on life and has such an amazing attitude about it, no matter what is thrown her way,” said O’Leary, who’s in her seventh season at UVA.

When she played at Virginia, she was Cindy Brinker. That changed when she married Bob Simmons in 1990, but she remains as upbeat and exuberant as when she arrived on Grounds in 1975, not long after the University had gone co-ed.

“She’s the best. I love her,” O’Leary said. “Every time that she comes to Charlottesville, we grab coffee or she’ll come over to our house for dinner. I just think she’s a wonderful person and has a lot of joy and she’s super kind, and I look up to her a lot. She’s accomplished so many amazing things in her life and then also dealt with a lot of tough things in her life. She’s just been an amazing friend and mentor to me.”

Brinker Simmons, who was born in San Diego, grew up in Dallas. Her father was Norm Brinker. Her mother was Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly Brinker, a tennis legend who won nine major titles in singles, including a Grand Slam (the first by a woman) in 1953.

“Mom never wanted me to play tennis,” Brinker Simmons recalled, “because she never wanted me to feel the pressures of following in the footsteps of a famous parent. And she was right. There were pressures. But she always said, ‘If that’s what Cindy wants to do, then I will let her do that.’ And I just think that tennis was in my blood. It was in my DNA.”

In 1969, when Brinker Simmons was 12, her mother died of cancer. Not long after that, Brinker Simmons was invited to play in the 12-and-under national tournament, and her grief fueled her on the court.

“I just think I was so full of adrenaline,” she said, “because I had just had this seismic, cataclysmic devastation that just broke my heart.”

She finished that year ranked 10^th in the national and fourth in Texas in her age group. Her mom’s passing, Brinker Simmons said, “ignited my love for tennis. I think, candidly, it was my way of keeping in touch with my mom. It was my way of keeping that legacy alive. Not that I was as good as Mom—absolutely not—but it was an anomaly at that point in the ‘70s to have the daughter of a famous tennis player playing tennis. It didn’t happen.

“I persevered and I practiced probably three times times longer than my opponents, just because I just wasn’t naturally a gifted athlete. And sure enough, I became No. 1 in Texas every year, and I played all the nationals and usually was somewhere between 10 or 15 in the top 20 in the nation.”

She attracted the interest of many college programs and narrowed her choices to Virginia and North Carolina. “It was nip and tuck,” Brinker Simmons recalled, but the persistence and charm of UVA icon Gordon Burris, who was then assisting the women’s tennis team, won her over.

“I just felt that I would have a friend at UVA,” she said, “and sure enough, I chose UVA.”

Brinker Simmons, who lettered four times in tennis and was a team captain, was honored as UVA’s female student-athlete of the year in 1977-78. To stay in shape for tennis, she ran on her own, and Dennis Craddock, head coach of the Cavaliers’ track & field and cross country teams, noticed her putting in miles around Grounds.

Craddock needed another cross country runner and asked her to join the team. Brinker Simmons agreed, with the stipulation that “I would never practice with the cross country team, because my allegiance was to tennis,” she said.

When she was an undergraduate, Brinker Simmons said, little was made in Charlottesville of her late mother’s status in the tennis world.

“I was here on my own,” Brinker Simmons said. “I wasn’t anybody’s daughter. My dad was in business and he did fairly well, and [in Dallas] if I wasn’t Little Mo’s daughter, I was Norm Brinker’s daughter. So when I came here, it was just all about Cindy.  My victories were my victories, my defeats were my defeats, I had to learn how to deal with both graciously. This was a time that I really built my confidence.”

Brinker Simmons, who carried a double major (communications and Spanish), graduated from the University in 1979. She then returned to Dallas and launched a career in public relations. In addition to heading Brinker Communications until her retirement in 2012, she’s stayed active in other endeavors.

In 1980, Brinker Simmons founded Wipe Out Kids’ Cancer, a non-profit organization. At her mother’s funeral 11 years earlier, Brinker Simmons recalled, “I was so angry and so heartbroken and so confused that I said, at age 12, that someday, somehow, somewhere I’m going to do something to eradicate this scourge of a disease. That was my promise to myself at age 12. I didn’t know what that looked like. I didn’t even really know what that meant, but I was just angry.”

After graduating from UVA, she held a fundraiser at a Dallas-area country club. “Our goal was $2,000, and we raised $6,000 for the American Cancer Society.”

The next year the event raised $15,000, and it continued to grow. “A movement began,” Brinker Simmons said. “We incorporated and we became our own 501(c)(3). So now it’s Wipe Out Kids Cancer, and we have been responsible for raising over $32 million [for pediatric cancer research].”

Brinker Simmons still heads Wipe Out Kids’ Cancer. She also continues to serve as president of the Maureen Connolly Brinker Tennis Foundation, which sponsors “Little Mo” tournaments in the United States and abroad.

Her love for UVA has never waned. She and her father endowed a women’s tennis scholarship in her name—graduate student Natasha Subhash is the recipient for 2023-24—and Brinker Simmons joined the board of trustees of what is now the Virginia Athletics Foundation in the early 2000s. Not long after that, however, her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and she withdrew from the board to focus on caring for him and their son, William.

Bob Simmons passed away in 2015. After their son started college, Brinker Simmons rejoined the VAF board and served as a trustee from 2015 to 2021.

She remains close with Burris, who still lives in Charlottesville, and has forged a strong friendship with O’Leary.

“We connect on so many levels,” Brinker Simmons said. “She is the real deal. She is a superstar, and what I love about her, and what I love about [UVA head men’s tennis coach Andres Pedroso], is they recognize the power of relationships, which is something that I talk about in my book.”

That book, titled RESTORED Reconnecting Life’s Broken Pieces, was published this year. Brinker Simmons worked on it for seven years.

“Writing a book is not for the faint of heart, let me tell you,” she said, laughing. “It’s a big project.”

In New York City, at a banquet last September, Brinker received the David A Benjamin Achievement Award for 2023 from the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. The award honors former college tennis players who have excelled in their careers.

In Charlottesville, at the Virginia Tennis Facility at the Boar’s Head Resort, the first court is the “Little Mo Court.” When Brinker Simmons returned to town last month for the celebration of the women’s program’s 50^th anniversary, it “was the first time I’d seen the court in play,” she said. “I’d seen pictures of it, but I hadn’t been back when the team was playing. So it was very touching for me.”

O’Leary and her players appreciate the support, financial and otherwise, Brinker Simmons to show for her alma mater.

“She’s one of the trailblazers of our program,” O’Leary said. “And so to have someone, almost 50 years after she played, still support us the way she does and believe in us the way she does, it’s just amazing. I feel like every day we’re aiming to make her proud of what we’re doing and the way that my team is conducting itself. We’re very, very fortunate.”

Brinker Simmons is thankful, too. There are plenty of other excellent schools, she knows, “but all I can say is I’m so glad I chose UVA. What a blessing. That was a life-changer for me. I’m so grateful.”

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