It takes six players to compete in an intercollegiate tennis meet.

Getting those six players can be a surprisingly complex process, involving success in both national and international recruiting.

ISU head coach Michele Conlon said her recruiting begins in Iowa State’s backyard, and then she recruits out of state.

“If there are players in Iowa that can compete in the Big 12 Conference, we will go after those,” Conlon said.

“At least one to three Division I players come out of the state of Iowa per year. Then we go to the Missouri Valley region, which is a five-state region around Iowa called the [United States Tennis Association] section. We also recruit the northern section, which is Minnesota.”

One form of recruiting Conlon uses is word of mouth. Conlon has signed Caitlin Loprinzi, who is a friends with former high school teammate Jill Palen of Rochester, Minn. Loprinzi was Minnesota’s 2003 Class 2A state singles champion.

After recruiting in Iowa and around the Midwest, Conlon recruits at a national level by traveling to two national tournaments every year in California that take place during the end of July and the beginning of August. The top players in the country compete at these tournaments.

One common theme among colleges offering women’s tennis is the recruiting of international players. This season, 45 percent of the women’s tennis players competing in the Big 12 are international players, with the majority being from Europe. More than half of the top 100 players in Division I women’s tennis come from other countries.

Big 12 schools such as Baylor, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska have four or more international players on their rosters, with Baylor having eight international players on its nine-woman roster.

Although Iowa State doesn’t have the number of international players that Baylor has, two of the Cyclones’ six scholarship players are international student-athletes — sophomore Charlotte Ljungkrantz, who’s from Taby, Sweden and senior Sabrina Evers. who’s from Waddinxveen, Netherlands.

“There is a huge influx of international students,” Conlon said.

“A lot of the European kids now are actively seeking to come over here, so the European players are writing to the universities. It’s nice to have international students from a diversity standpoint, and I think it provides a great experience for the other players on the team.”

Evers traveled to Iowa State from Waddinxveen, Holland, after an already lengthy tennis career. Evers started playing tennis at the age of 7. She first competed in the Holland national championships at the age of 12 and has competed in them five times since.

She heard about the opportunity to play in the United States through another international ISU player, Noortje Cornelissen. During the summer of Evers’ junior year in high school, Cornelissen told her about playing in the United States, which persuaded Evers to come overseas.

“After talking with Noortje, I got very interested,” Evers said. “I had an adviser that made a video of me, and we sent it to a bunch of schools. I got a lot of scholarship offers, but I chose Iowa State because it’s a good economics school, and their tennis program is pretty good.”

Evers said she felt lucky to get such a great opportunity to be able to combine school and tennis. In Holland, college students don’t get the chance to play sports for the college. The individual has to choose between playing a sport or going to college and working to pay for college.

Iowa State can offer eight full women’s tennis scholarships, which is the maximum allowed by the NCAA. The Cyclones’ roster currently consists of two freshman, three sophomores, no juniors and one senior. With tennis scholarships, coaches are unable to split the money for the scholarships, which can create voids in recruiting classes.

“For tennis scholarships, it’s what we call a head count,” Conlon said.

“If we were to give a player 10 bucks, that would count as a whole scholarship. We can’t divvy it up like some sports. We can’t give one player 30 percent and another 70 percent.”

Recruiting with only eight scholarships leaves a coach with the tough decision of whether to save scholarships for the next year’s recruiting class or use the open scholarships all on one class. This is the reason Iowa State was unable to offer scholarships to any players for 2002.

Because the number of tennis scholarships at any Big 12 school is limited, each university needs a selling point to convince student-athletes to sign with its program. Texas A&M has a $4.2 million outdoor facility that was constructed in 1998 and was chosen as the USTA Facility of the Year in 1999.

Though the Cyclones don’t have the caliber of facilities the Aggies do, Conlon finds other ways to attract athletes to Iowa State.

The ISU women’s tennis team can boast about something most other collegiate athletic programs cannot. In Conlon’s 12-year tenure at Iowa State, she has graduated 100 percent of her tennis players, and last year the Cyclones were named to the Academic All-American Team.

“There are a lot of great reasons to come to Iowa State,” Conlon said.

“One of our biggest selling points is academics. I think our professors at Iowa State do an outstanding job of working with all the students. They’ve really created great learning environments in nationally recognized programs, so when a student-athlete gets a degree from Iowa State, it really means something.”