These days, Dianne Matias can say things that only a few years ago, would have been impossible to say without either bursting out in laughter, destroying some of her hard-earned credibility, or prompting pitiful head shakes from her team, her recruits and anyone who cared about the Cal State Fullerton tennis program.
No, The coach has not lost it.
Matias may have shed a lot of things since taking over the Titans tennis program in 2013: the image that tennis at Cal State Fullerton is a country-club sport, the concept that players can come in, take it easy and enjoy the scenery and travel for four years and the perception that the tennis program is there to take up valuable Title IX real estate and nothing more.
But Matias hasn’t lost her sense of reality, nor her sense of purpose.
“The biggest thing is the change of culture and just expectations. I tell them, ‘You guys are expected to win. I don’t care what the history of the program is. Your expectations now are to win a Big West championship,’” she said. “It’s really funny I can say that to my team right now.”
And she can say it with a straight face.
Since coming to CSUF from the top assistant’s position at UC Irvine six seasons ago, Matias has led a tennis renaissance.
The Titans entered the week 8-3 this season, 3-1 in the Big West, and are a credible threat to win their first Big West tennis title since 1970.
In turn, Matias is a credible threat to add a second Big West Coach of the Year honor to go with the one she won in 2016. That year — when the senior-less Titans won 17 matches and earned their first winning record since 2004 — started the best three-year run in program history, where Matias’ teams went 56-16. They bettered those 17 wins in each successive season: with 19 wins in 2017 and a school-record 20 last year.
That 2017 team went 19-4, for a school-record .826 winning percentage and last year’s 20-8 team nearly pulled off that conference title, losing to Hawaii in the Big West finals.
Matias, meanwhile, has won 63 percent of her matches since arriving before the 2014 season.
“To be honest now, I don’t think I realized how fast the program has turned around. I’ve been focused on how well we’d do,” she said. “Even now, I haven’t realized we turned the corner pretty fast.”
How did she turn the Titans around so fast?
Well, the Philippines native may have been a former junior tennis prodigy; she was the USTA’s Southern California Player of the Year in 2000 and the No. 1-ranked Under-16 singles player in the country in 2000 and 2001, and she may have played collegiately at USC.
But there is nothing elitist or cryptic in Matias, her game or her approach, which was honed not in country clubs, but in parks nearby her South Bay home, playing with her two younger brothers and learning from her dad, George.
Her approach is straightforward, unapologetic and structured and when she took over at CSUF, it was clear that things were going to be different — whether players wanted to embrace it or not.
Matias instituted 6 a.m. conditioning sessions twice a week. She made practices more physically demanding, scheduled regular meetings with a sports psychologist and held meetings with every player to learn their mindset in matches and see how their games held up.
After evaluating every player, Matias went to work adding more weapons to each player’s arsenal, instilling more drills to build more variety in her players’ games. There would be no one-trick-pony tennis players at Cal State Fullerton. That would not do.
Other things would not do. Matias made it clear the work ethic she had seen wasn’t sufficient for a Division I program.
“It takes a certain player to be a part of this program, and I make it clear it’s not going to be easy. You’re going to be pushed, you’re going to be challenged, and you’re not going to be spoiled here at Cal State Fullerton,” she said.
“I went to USC, and we were spoiled. Here at Fullerton, you’re going to be grateful for everything you have.
“We have a blue collar mentality here, with no sense of entitlement, and I make sure my players know that.”
In case they need a reminder, there’s that little thing called the “preseason fitness test” that Matias implemented. Every player is expected to run 1½ miles under 11½ minutes, then complete what Matias calls “17.”
“Seventeen,” in this case, is more than a prime number. It’s a prime test of fitness and a prime gauge that players weren’t taking the off-season off. Every player has to go sideline-to-sideline 17 times in under 55 seconds. They, then get a minute rest before doing it again, followed by another minute rest — and then, a third and final time.
When a player completes this, Matias gives them something: Their uniform.
“There was definitely a learning curve. I don’t think it started clicking until the end of my second season,” she said. “They were fighting what I was trying to do because it was harder work. Some of the girls just wanted to have fun and I said in order for us to get better, we have to put a lot more work in. Not necessarily in terms of longer practices, but work that was specific to each person in terms of what they needed to work on.”
By the end of the 2015 season, Matias started to see the pieces fall in place and not only because she inherited Alexis Valenzuela and Camille De Leon as freshmen. Valenzuela would be a three-time Big West Singles First Team choice and team with De Leon to become only the second Titans tandem to earn First Team accolades in doubles.
The following three years showed why nobody’s laughing at anything Matias says.
“We just had more depth from 1-7; there wasn’t a huge drop-off in the level of players and a lot of those players had pretty successful junior careers and they knew I had high expectations from them,” Matias said. “I think they were also excited that they had an opportunity to turn the program around. They bought into the opportunity to make history.”
Matias says that proudly and without a trace of irony or humor. Again, nobody’s laughing and the only head shakes are done in awe.
