Holding Court with...Jamea Jackson

The temperatures reached the mid-90s in Central Florida in recent days, as the nation’s best college players took the courts for the NCAA Championships in Lake Nona. Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have fazed Atlanta native and longtime Floridian Jamea Jackson. She spent a good part of her youth under that same sun, grinding through the famously frenetic workouts at the Bollettieri (now IMG) Academy in Bradenton.

But that was before Jackson took over as the head coach of the women’s tennis team at Princeton last August. A winter spent in (relatively) chilly New Jersey had taken its toll on her tolerance for high temps and heavy humidity.

“We have to go out and play in this heat!” Jackson said of herself and two of her Princeton players, who were getting ready for the individual events this week. “I guess I need to readjust,” she added with a laugh.

She spent the hottest part of Monday afternoon watching her No. 1 player and senior team leader, Daria Frayman, survive a three-set war against USC’s Eryn Cayetano in the first round of the women’s singles. Jackson’s duties included coaching, as well as shading her player with a Princeton-themed orange-and-black umbrella on changeovers. The victory continued Jackson’s stellar rookie year as coach. Princeton went 17-7, was undefeated in Ivy League matches, and won a round at the NCAA Regionals. Most important, the four seniors on the team completed a four-peat as Ivy League champions.

Jackson, 36, says “everyone keeps telling me it wasn’t a cold winter,” but her first extended stay up north meant adapting to more than just the weather. She had coached college players before, as an assistant at Oklahoma State, but she’d spent the previous nine years in the USTA’s player-development department in Boca Raton, where she helped mold a new generation of Americans as National Coach for Women’s Tennis. Now Jackson was leaving an all-tennis, all-the-time atmosphere to lead a team at an institution where sports still takes a back seat to studies. Coming to Princeton was a leap into a new world, but one she knew she had to take.

I’ve always believed in using sports as a way to teach.

Last summer, Jackson’s family gathered over the July 4th weekend for the first time since the Covid pandemic began two years earlier. She had left the USTA in the midst of budget cuts to the Player Development program, and was looking for what might come next. In the midst of the festivities, she got a call from a colleague who had a piece of intriguing news: “Princeton’s open,” he said.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a pretty big-time name brand!’ I was definitely interested.”

The Northeast and the Ivy League were new frontiers for Jackson, but she quickly found a like-minded mentor in the school’s AD, John Mack.

“I’ve been lucky to have great bosses, and he has been another person like that,” Jackson says.

Just as important, Jackson found that the school’s philosophy of sports and teaching meshed with hers.

“Education comes first here, which is heartening,” she says. “The school hasn’t gotten away from that mission.”

Practice times are scheduled around class time at Princeton, and part of a coach’s job is to make sure the players get their school work done.

“That’s another part of the puzzle that I like about the job,” Jackson says. “I’ve always believed in using sports as a way to teach.”

Athletics and education have gone hand in hand for Jackson since she first moved from Atlanta to the Bollettieri Academy as an 11-year-old. Unlike many of her peers, her parents, Ernest—who played cornerback in the NFL for eight seasons—and Ruby moved to Bradenton with her. Her life each day was practice, school, and practice again. Then her parents came to pick her up as soon as she was done.

“I lived off-campus, so my stories from Bollettieri’s might not be as good as some others,” Jackson says with a laugh.

Still, she looks back on her time there as “heaven on earth.” The intense training, and the chance to play alongside the likes of Maria Sharapova and Jelena Jankovic and other past and future No. 1s was “crazy exciting.”

“It was such a hub,” she says. “The academy influenced me as a person, and taught me about hard work, sacrifice, learning as a group.”

“It was hard when Nick passed,” she says of Bollettieri, who died last December at 91. “He meant a lot to my life.”

Jackson turned pro in 2003 and reached a career-high ranking of No. 45 in 2006. That year she also made a historical claim to fame in Key Biscayne, when became the first player ever to challenge a line call with the new Hawk-Eye replay system. By 2009, though, she had discovered that what she first thought was a groin pull was something “deep in my hip,” and she was forced to retire at just 22.

She had never thought of coaching during her playing days, but when someone suggested it to her, she thought, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.” Not long after coming off the tour, she found herself on the Oklahoma State campus, working as an assistant for head women’s coach Chris Young.

“That was an eye-opening shock to the system,” Jackson says of her move to Stillwater, Okla.

But she found a mentor in Young. In watching him, she also found a calling.

“I wanted to be him, to do that he does,” Jackson says of Young, who has led the Cowgirls to five NCAA Sweet 16s in the last seven years. “The way he treats people, the way he connects with people.”

Jackson’s love of coaching was born.

“It’s so rewarding, in a way that playing isn’t,” she says. “When you’re playing, you’re moving from tournament to the next, one city to the next. When you’re coaching, you’re helping someone grow.”

At Princeton, Jackson took over the head coaching position from her friend and fellow former U.S. pro Laura Granville, who stepped down in 2022 after leading the team to six Ivy titles in 10 years.

“Laura built a great program,” Jackson says.

As much as its coaches, though, Princeton tennis reflects the university’s traditions.

“This is a place where leaders are made,” Jackson says. “These girls are really mature and together.”

Jackson doesn’t have to “beat the pavement” to coax juniors to come to the university, the way she did at OK State. The challenge at Princeton is finding anyone who can make it into a school with a 4.4 percent acceptance rate.

“It’s hard to get in, let’s be honest,” Jackson says. “So many kids reach out on the front end, but admissions has the final word.”

As for recent developments in college sports, like the transfer portal and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), Jackson is mostly insulated from them. Princeton rejects 99 percent of transfer applications, and as a coach, she’s not allowed to be involved in players’ NIL deals.

Jackson says she hopes to get to know her new Northeastern environs a little more in the coming months; she was too busy in her rookie season to look around much. She’ll lose four seniors this fall, but Princeton will never lack for young people who want to come there for tennis—and, as Jackson says, to use sports as a way to learn.

“So much of it is the player you get,” Jackson says of the secret to college coaching success. “We’ve got some good ones coming in.”