Devolver bien por mal -- Jorge Gutierrez a Former Player from FSC

It is the Monday after Thanksgiving and we are speeding towards the second to last holiday of the year. Christmas is right around the corner, or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, or any other celebration that may be appropriate for your culture. It is time to reflect on the good, the bad, and the things that we want to make better as we move towards a new year. It has been a year of learning, growing, and a lot of tweets from world leaders. Hopefully, there will be a lot of about two out of three next year as well.

Tonight, I have decided to pen a bit about the happy Spaniard I had the privilege of coaching for three years.

Jorge Gutierrez came to Florida Southern from Spain as a highly recruited player. Somehow, he found his way to us, as I would later find out that many other higher ranked schools were interested in him. From the beginning the kid was great. He barely spoke connective English but always had a smile and a great spirit on the court. He was a hard-working student and managed to make great grades in classes that he didn’t even understand early on in his college career. One of the funniest things was his outstanding performance in his freshman English class. He made great grades on his writing assignments, often scoring better than his American classmates. Not only was he a good tennis player, he also had skills for learning how to utilize the college academic system to his utmost advantage. You see, there were writing labs where students could take their papers to have them looked over before they were presented. Jorge would put his thoughts down and then march them over to the writing lab to have them put in proper form. It was a type of Spanish/English to English literary translation that resulted in Dean’s list grades for his entire time at FSC. During his senior year he was also part of a group of players who presented their senior capstone on JetBlue Airlines. The group knocked it out of the park and we were anticipating graduation and Jorge playing another year while doing his MBA to further enhance his American business knowledge.

On the court Jorge was more at home. He had moments of utter brilliance and then there were days where he played to be more exacting. The fun about Jorge was you never knew which one was going to appear. During his three seasons playing at FSC he had a winning record all three years in singles. He played predominately at positions five and six with guest appearances higher up the roster. He was a big hitting left hander with powerful shots. He gained himself so many opportunities to move forward and finish with simple volleys or overpowering forehands it became impossible to count all of them. The only problem was that the attack portion of the court was as about as uncomfortable to Jorge as a ten-minute speech about what it meant to be an American during his freshman year. All kidding aside, Jorge was a grinding singles player who had everything necessary to be a dominating presence on the court. He was a hero for some of our biggest wins and I will never forget the day he was the clinching point against Queen’s College. The roar from his teammates and the crowd was just one of those moments that is indelibly marked in your memory.

As I spoke about above, the net and surrounding areas weren’t Jorge’s most comfortable places, but he had success in doubles. During his freshman season he went 13-4 at two and three doubles. The biggest surprise came with a losing record his second season. That year he and his partner only went 11-13 but all the matches were played at number one doubles. Yes, he played number one with Ivan Marevic. Ivan, who I will write about later was a hard hitting, go for broke player and needed someone that could open the court for him to take his risks. Enter Jorge and his own version of erratic, go for broke doubles style. The two of them made an odd pair but they had so many close matches the overall record could have easily flipped or even been hugely successful. The best part of the whole experiment was that Jorge accepted his role and embraced the fact that he was on the number one team and needed to lead as such.

Jorge never got to play his fourth year at FSC. He was offered the opportunity to go back to Spain, obtain his MBA, and learn at the family business. Selfishly, I wanted him to stay but as we always preached growth was painful, and the goal was to be a great beyond the tennis courts. He has gone on to do wonderful things in Spain and is now in an industry he desires to learn more about. Hopefully, he is still acting like he did when he was playing with reckless abandon and never feels like he is comfortably ahead. Some of his best performances on the court came when he was underestimated by his opponent. I hope none of his new business constituents ever underestimate what Jorge can do.

During his time at FSC, I never felt that Jorge was comfortable with who he was or what he was truly capable of doing with the talent he had. Early on in this little bio I mentioned that he was highly recruited. I will never forget the first fall regional tournament we went to in Valdosta. I was watching him battle a really talented player from a highly ranked team. A coach from another highly ranked team came up and was just baffled how I ended up with Jorge. He stated that he had tried along with some other schools and he knew that they could have offered him more. I am really glad he came to FSC because I got a lot more from him than I could have ever offered him.