Fox Chapel grad Lacey Cohen's tennis future up in air at Slippery Rock

Lacey Cohen begins an occupational therapy doctoral program June 1 at Slippery Rock.

The Fox Chapel graduate and senior on The Rock tennis team said she will get a good look at her workload at that time to determine if she will be able to use the extra year of eligibility the NCAA granted to spring college athletes.

“I know I will be involved (with the team) in some way,” said Cohen.

The coronavirus pandemic canceled plans for many colleges this spring. For Cohen, the team’s spring break trip Hilton Head, S.C., from March 8-13 concluded her fourth and potentially final season.

Cohen owns a combined 123 singles and doubles victories at Slippery Rock and won the 2018 Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference singles championship.

She was voted the 2018-19 PSAC West Division Athlete of the Year for women’s tennis after a junior campaign in which she had a combined singles and doubles record of 37-21 and a 9-1 mark in PSAC West matches. That season, in addition to her PSAC singles title, she became the 11th player in program history to eclipse 100 wins.

“Winning the PSAC title was a great feat for her,” Slippery Rock coach Matt Meredith said. “That was the first one in our history, and we’ve had some great players represent the program. That was a great accomplishment.”

Cohen’s 123 wins rank sixth on the school’s all-time list, and she was 14 wins away from fifth. Meredith said she would’ve had a great chance to reach that mark this spring with 11 regular-season matches left and an unknown number of PSAC and NCAA playoff matches.

Meredith said he is excited for whatever Cohen can bring to the team in the future.

“Her (graduate) program is very intense, so we’re not sure what she will be able to do,” he said. “One option is for her to be a student assistant with the team to help out when she can. If we see that she is able to handle the academic part of her graduate work and still play tennis, that certainly is an option. We just haven’t crossed it yet.

“Having her work with the freshmen coming in and continuing to help the ones she’s already helped out would be tremendous, regardless of whether or not she would be able to play herself. I would take anything I could get.”

Cohen recently found out she will graduate summa cum laude.

“It’s always been a delicate balance between tennis and schoolwork,” she said. “I worked super hard to achieve that. It makes me feel I am prepared to do well (with graduate classes).”

Cohen finished the 2019-20 season with a combined 13-7 record. In September, she advanced to the semifinals of the PSAC singles tournament and also the semifinals of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Atlantic Regional.

“I know every year the competition is challenging,” Cohen said. “I was well-coached, and I played well throughout the tournament.”

The spring portion of the season brought Cohen and her teammates to Hilton Head for five matches. The day before the final match of the trip, the NCAA announced its cancellation edict.

“Being together when we got the news kind of helped,” said Cohen, who finished the season No. 11 in the ITA Atlantic Region singles rankings.

“We went into that last match with a lot of emotion.”

Cohen felt the team was on the right track to advance to its third straight NCAA Division II Tournament and challenge for a fourth trip to the round of 16 in program history.

“We were super optimistic,” she said. “We were training really hard. We were ready to play for not only ourselves and the school but for each other.”

Knowing the season was ending with its March 13 match against Salem (W.Va.), the team quickly organized a pre-match senior ceremony honoring Cohen and fellow senior Viola Lugmayr, a native of Austria and one of the team’s top doubles players.

“It was an unconventional senior day, but with the balloons and flowers, it was still really nice,” she said.

Asked to pick out a top moment from her Slippery Rock career, Cohen couldn’t narrow it down.

“It’s been an amazing overall experience I wouldn’t have traded for the world,” she said. “I’ve loved playing D-II tennis and playing for Slippery Rock.”