Rice Helps Set Standard for Cavaliers

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Like golf, tennis is widely considered a country club sport, but as a boy Keegan Rice often swung his racket in more modest surroundings.

Rice, a third-year at the University of Virginia, grew up in Regina, the capital of the Canadian province Saskatchewan. He started taking lessons on outdoor courts there when he was 5 years old, but “when it got colder in the fall—unfortunately, pretty early in September—we’d go indoors,” Rice recalled recently at the Boar’s Head Resort, “and we don’t actually have a facility for tennis outdoors.”

What Regina does have is the Fieldhouse, a multi-purpose building in which numerous sports, including basketball, volleyball, badminton and football, are played and taught. Track & field athletes also train and compete there.

The Fieldhouse has lines for tennis courts, Rice said, “but there's also lines for basketball courts, and you've got high-jump mats. Sometimes on the back of the courts you’re running over the covers for the long-jump pits. You come back from the weekend and there's a track meet there. There are shot-put dents in the court. So there's not much tennis, but the people who do play are pretty into it.”

None of that deterred Rice. He played other sports as a boy, soccer and volleyball among them, but showed the most promise in tennis. Before his 11^th-grade year, he was invited to train at Canada’s National Tennis Centre in Montreal. He left Regina and moved in with a host family in Montreal.

“From 16 to 18, that was my base,” said Rice, who finished high school by taking online classes.

His success in junior tournaments, including the Australian, French Open and Wimbledon, attracted the attention of NCAA programs.

“Being Canadian, you know what college sports in the States are, but you're not really informed,” Rice said. “So slowly I started following college tennis more and more as schools started reaching out to me.”

Virginia was one of those schools, and head coach Andres Pedroso began recruiting Rice in earnest. It was a slow process, but during a period when a foot injury kept Rice off the court, he set up a visit to UVA.

“I visited a few other schools,” said Rice, whose coach in Canada is Marek Nehasil. “This was my last one, and it was by far the best.”

He signed with the Cavaliers in November 2023.

“It actually took a long time to get Keegan interested in the University of Virginia,” associate head coach Brian Rasmussen recalled, “but from the point he was interested to the visit to his decision, that part was quick.”

As a first-year in 2024-25, Rice went 19-13 in singles, playing mainly at No. 3, amd helped Virginia advance to the NCAA quarterfinals.

As a second-year, he primarily played at No. 2 in singles and posted a 35-6 record, and he was a key figure in the Wahoos’ run to the program’s seventh NCAA title.

In the championship match, fourth-seeded Virginia rallied to defeat second-seeded Texas 4-3 in Athens, Ga. Rice won 6-1, 6-3 at No. 2 singles to earn a point for the Hoos.

“On paper, we shouldn't have won last year,” Rice said. “It just felt like a miracle how close we were to being knocked out so many times in the tournament and everybody doing their part, coming together when it mattered most. It was impressive to see how everyone came together as a team. There were tough moments throughout the season, for sure, but it was just magical the way that it [ended].”

Rice, who’ll play in next week’s ATP Challenger at the Boar’s Head Resort, has had an outstanding fall. In the ITA All-American, he was the singles runner-up . That earned him a spot in the NCAA Championships, which start Nov. 17 in Athens, Ga.

“That was the goal,” Rice said. “I had expectations that I would be able to do that, for sure. And so each match I was trying not to focus on how I was going to win, but how I was going to play—the same things I've been working on in practice, approaching every match the same and executing my best.”

Rice’s commitment to his craft is unsurpassed, Rasmussen said. “He absolutely loves tennis. I’ve met only a few people who love tennis as much as Keegan.

"I think it's contagious practicing with Keegan, because he just enjoys everything about it. He's always looking to tinker with little things, but he also has a pretty good clarity out there, a pretty good understanding of how he needs to play, what his identity is, and he's willing to do a lot more than most players to be really good at that.

“Keegan does a really good job of knowing where he wants to go, and he just pushes himself and he has a relentless attitude of, ‘I'm going to get here.’ And all the while he’s type of guy who’s still present where his feet are and allows himself to be coached hard, and I think that's kind of the perfect recipe right there.”

Rice, an outstanding student, knows there’s more to life than tennis, Rasmussen said, “but, man, does he enjoy it, and he loves watching it. He loves talking about it. He loves playing it. It's pretty fun to be around someone like that.”

At 5-foot-10 and about 160 pounds, Rice isn't an intimidating physical presence on the court, but “he does not lack power,” UVA assistant coach Treat Huey said.

“He's got great pop on the ball. His timing is really, really good,” Huey said. “That helps, obviously, but since he's been here I think he's put on 10-15 pounds of muscle. He's gotten bigger and stronger, and he’ll continue to do that the next two years to reach his full potential. But he’s somebody that's always looking to learn and continue to get better. He recognizes he can get better, and he doesn't know it all. He's not at the peak of his powers yet, and he’s always trying to add new things to his game, make parts of his game better and better and better. And that's what makes him really, really good.”

Rice, an economics major, said law school might be in his future. His parents are attorneys in Canada, and law is “always something I've been interested in,” he said. “My dad would come home with hypothetical situations and we would need to figure them out at the dinner table, and it kind of just stemmed from there.”

Pedroso emphasizes to his players the value of a UVA degree, and that message resonated with Rice’s parents.

“One hundred percent,” Rice said. “They were very big on me getting my education and having something [to fall back on]. You never know in tennis. You can get injured. Anything can happen, and you're going to need to be able to do something in life. Especially during our first call with Coach, when he told them that you’re a student first and tennis is second, they loved that.”

Rice once dreamed of turning pro out of high school, and when he enrolled at UVA  in 2024, he wasn’t sure what to expect from college tennis.

“It’s definitely been more than what I had hoped for,” he said, “and that just comes from the team, from the coaches, and what we what we do every day. Everybody's pushing themselves in all aspects: tennis, academics, just the culture of the team.”

Rice helps set the standard, Rasmussen said. “He’s a great representation of what our culture wants to be, but I also think it's a great testament to how if you manage all the things at the same intensity, you're probably gonna find success in all of them. I think a lot of times, myself included, you get so consumed with the thought of, ‘This is how I'm gonna get this’ that you miss the outside things. Keegan, he's present in everything. He wants to make [teammates] have a great UVA experience. He feels indebted to give good practice. So I think he takes on everything with the same pride and intensity, and it's just infectious in that way.”

Over the years, teams representing UVA have won 37 NCAA championships. Three of those programs—men’s tennis, men’s lacrosse and men’s soccer—have captured seven titles each, and women’s swimming has won six.

Rice and his teammates would like nothing better than to bring another championship trophy back to the Boar’s Head, and the Hoos figure to be among the contenders again in the spring.

“I think now we know what it takes and what kind of things have to happen and line up for us to win,” Rice said. “We know how close we have to be as a team, how hard we have to work, how much we have to buy in, because we didn't know last year. We hadn’t won [since 2023], and we just gave it everything. So now, this year, there's kind of benchmark, not for necessarily results throughout the season, but just the standard of living every day.”

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