TCU tennis player Lui Maxted still remembers answering the FaceTime call from coach
Devin Bowen. This was in the throes of the pandemic, and Bowen was recruiting the
United Kingdom phenom in one of the only ways available.
“He took me on this really quick video tour of campus,” Maxted said. “It was blurry,
but that’s where I wanted to go.”
Now, almost four years later, Maxted and his fellow Horned Frog tennis seniors — Pedro
Vives and Luke Swan — have amassed a level of wins, trophies and championships that
make them arguably the most accomplished class in TCU men’s tennis history. And that’s
saying something when you consider names like Cam Norrie, Alex Rybakov, Esteban Carril,
and Horned Frog-player-now-men’s tennis-coach David Roditi have come through the purple
courts during the program’s history.
“Are we talking like total wins?” Maxted asked.
“Championships, trophies,” Roditi interjected. “What you guys are is the common denominator.”
“Obviously, I’ve thought about it, but I don’t think it’s actually sunk in yet,” Maxted
said. “There is a lot of history here, but I don’t know. I guess it’s just in our
nature to just win. I don’t mean that in a cocky way, but tennis players just try
to win their next match, and Pedro and I have done that pretty well over the last
four years.”
Maxted and Vives — both economics majors in the AddRan College of Liberal Arts — and
Swan, a marketing major in the Neeley School of Business and the John V. Roach Honors
College — helped add to that legacy by winning the Big 12 Championship outright this
spring. And while they came up short in the conference tournament Easter weekend in
Waco, they hope they have one more run in them as they prepare to defend their National
Championship when NCAA tournament begins in May.
“We’ve actually talked about it with Lui, Jake and the people who were here three
years ago when we won our first indoor national championship,” Vives said. “It was
the first one, so it felt like, ‘Wow, we can do it.’ That set the standard. If we
can win the indoor, why can’t we win the outdoor one?”
Maxted and Vives have been on this four-year ride that includes three national championships
(so far) together. The two came in as freshmen in 2022, playing supporting roles for
a TCU team that won the ITA Indoor National Championship, were the Big 12 regular-season
champions, reached the NCAA quarterfinals and finished No. 3 in the nation.
That was just their freshman year. The “By the Numbers” of these guys is incredible:
2023: ITA Indoor National Champions, Big 12 Conference Tournament Champions, NCAA Tournament
Semi-Finalists.
2024: NCAA National Champions, an honor earned by beating the University of Texas in the
finals, including current Horned Frog Jack Pinnington’s victory against the No. 1
ranked college player. They also finished second in the ITA indoors that year.
2025: Fast forward to now, Maxted and Vives are the No. 2 doubles team as ranked by the
ITA. Vives is ranked 8th and Maxted 33rd, individually. The Frogs are preparing to defend their national championship.
Not only is Athletics one of the four pillars of TCU’s recently launched strategic
plan LEAD ON: Values in Action, one of the goals for that pillar is for TCU to win 30 championships. The Horned
Frogs have a proof point in what has been happening in men’s tennis.
“I feel like at TCU we have always been so close, in many sports,” Roditi said. “There
were so many times, ‘We are so good. We are right there, right there.’ To actually
have won it meant the world. It was like this huge moment — for our fans, for our
TCU community to say, ‘We can do it. We can win the whole thing against the big Texas
school.’”
They can and they did.
Three years and three national championships helped by three seniors who have been
there for the ride.