When a tennis player hears that his playing hand is broken, one can assume that the player will not be playing tennis for a long while. Last year when Brandon Fickey broke his right playing hand in the middle of his senior season in high school, he told the coach it was time he used his left hand, and he won.
“Everything I do is left-handed, except tennis. I guess I’m kind of ambidextrous,” Fickey said. “I just kind of convinced my coach to let me try using my other hand, and after a few practices, he let me do it and I got a few wins.”
Fickey is a 5-foot-11, 173-pound freshman tennis player majoring in Biology and a Knoxville native. He attended and played tennis at Webb School of Knoxville before coming to Tennessee. While at Webb, Fickey became the first player in Tennessee to win four consecutive singles state championships and also helped the Spartans win two consecutive team state championships his junior and senior seasons.
Before choosing to play tennis for Tennessee, the freshman found reasons that ultimately made the decision for him.
“I used to play basketball and baseball, but with tennis, I decided to focus on it because of the individuality of it. I like being responsible for both winning and losing,” Fickey said. “When it came down to it, I just wanted to be at home. I live here, my family is here and I had a lot of conversations with them and felt like (Tennessee) was the best choice.”
Since joining the Tennessee tennis team, Fickey has registered a 12-9 overall singles record and a 10-7 doubles record. In the fall, he made it to the singles final of the Tennessee Fall Invitational before being taken down by teammate, Mikelis Libietis, and was able to win in doubles along side senior Bryan Swartz.
While he has not had that signature win against a top-ranked opponent and his record is not the blemish-free one that he would like, Fickey has the competitive spirit that all good athletes possess, and anyone who witnessed him go down in a match against Illinois’ No. 24 ranked Roy Kalmanovich saw that first hand.
Losing the final points and match point after calling balls out that were overruled good by the chair umpire, Fickey slammed his racket down and walked off the court. He was assessed a point penalty and a game penalty.
“(Fickey) handled things the exact opposite of how you should handle things,” Tennessee coach Sam Winterbotham said. “He threw a fit on the court today when things didn’t go his way.”
While his coach saw Fickey’s actions as a bad way to show competitiveness, he knows what he did was wrong and seems to be growing because of it.
“I thought it was a horrible call, and I took it the wrong way and got a little too upset about it,” Fickey said. “I should have let the coaches handle it. I hate to lose, and sometimes it gets the best of me, but I guess that’s what got me here. I am working on putting that emotion in the positive direction.”
At Tennessee, Fickey wants to be an All-American and has set his team goals as high as winning the national championship. If tennis is not ultimately in his future, he wants to go to medical school and do something involving sports medicine. While you can’t call him Dr. Fickey just yet, support for the team would be appreciated.
“It’s the second phase of the year now,” he said. “And we look to do good things.”
