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Wanda McPhail took a unique path to become a coach at Meridian Community College, and her tenure at the school brought anomalous success to the Eagles’ tennis program. McPhail was inducted into the Mississippi Tennis Hall of Fame on Saturday, almost six years after retiring from MCC, marking her fifth hall of fame induction.

“It’s just mind-boggling because I know so many of the people who are in the Hall of Fame, and they’ve been involved as teaching pros and played growing up and played in college and played professionally and those kinds of things,” McPhail said. “You don’t set out to think you’ll ever be in a hall of fame. You just go out there and do what you love. … I just feel like because I never interviewed for a coaching position that God placed me there because that was his purpose for me.”

McPhail played basketball for East Central Community College, and basketball coach Lucille Wood convinced McPhail to play for her tennis team as well. McPhail was unsure if she had ever held a tennis racket, or even if her hometown of Union had tennis courts, but she quickly fell in love with the sport that initially served as offseason conditioning for basketball.

She played two years at ECCC before attending Mississippi University for Women, where she decided not to try out because, “If I was good enough after two years of junior college to go play at a program like that, it wouldn’t give much respect to tennis.”

Instead, McPhail played recreationally while teaching at Kate Griffin Junior High in Meridian and as a stay-at-home mother.

“I’ve never interviewed for a coaching position in my life,” McPhail said. “I got to Kate Griffin as a recent graduate of MSCW, and the principal called me in and told me I was coaching the basketball team, that they were starting basketball back, and that was the first basketball they’d had since the 50’s for women. I said, ‘No, no, I just signed up to teach P.E.’”

McPhail coached basketball and track for five years at Kate Griffin before leaving in 1978, and she later began teaching and coaching at West Lauderdale High School in 1991. She taught and coached basketball and cheerleading at WLHS, and later became the inaugural coach of the volleyball team. WLHS did not have a tennis team until a student asked administration to start one, and McPhail was chosen to be the tennis coach as well.

“He went to the principal first to see if he would consider us having a tennis team,” McPhail said. “They talked about it, and he said, ‘Well, coach McPhail will coach it.’ I didn’t know that until after the fact, but anyway, that’s how I ended up coaching tennis at West Lauderdale, and I had some great, great athletes who just immediately took to it.”

McPhail said she wanted to coach the tennis program to give the school’s athletes another sport to choose from, as some student-athletes fall through the cracks in one sport when they could be good at another. MCC President Scott Elliott later convinced her to teach and coach at MCC in 2000 once all of her children graduated from high school.

“I told him I would try it for a year, but I wasn’t sure I would like it. The rest is history,” McPhail said. “I taught English in the Wellness Department, and then coached the men’s and women’s tennis teams. The first year we were terrible, but after that, the second year one of the teams qualified for nationals, and then we went every year after that until I retired.”

The tennis coach said she does not like to lose in checkers, much less in tennis. She worked her tennis teams hard, sometimes holding practices that took up entire afternoons, and exceptional results followed.

McPhail’s teams put up a 543-124 record by the time she retired in 2018, taking 15 Region 23 JUCO championships and nine Mississippi Association of Community and Junior Colleges championships back to Meridian. Her teams also won two national community service awards, and 11 of her players won the Arthur Ashe Leadership and Sportsmanship Award.

McPhail also earned numerous awards for her work at MCC in that time, including 19 Region 23 Coach of the Year awards, one United States Tennis Association Mississippi Coach of the Year award, and one Intercollegiate Tennis Association Wilson Coach of the Year award.

In addition to her coaching roles, McPhail has also served  as the National Junior College Women’s Coaches’ Association President and as the men’s junior college delegate on the ITA board, which she said is the achievement she is most proud of. She was inducted into the MCC Hall of Fame, the ECCC Hall of Fame, the Mississippi Junior College Sports Hall of Fame and the National Junior College Women’s Coaches’ Tennis Hall of Fame before adding her fifth athletics hall of fame induction on Saturday.

“I just want that legacy that it was about the whole person, and them leaving MCC a better person, and that they’re student-athletes, so I’ll really always focus on the fact that their academics were as important as what they were doing on the court, because most of them were not going to make a living someday playing tennis,” McPhail said. “Tennis was important, but it wasn’t as important as some areas of their lives, and I hope I was always a spiritual mentor to my players.”

McPhail still fondly recalls anecdotes from her time coaching at MCC, such as a time some MCC players got into some trouble and had to run hills at Sammie Davidson Sports Complex at 5 a.m., or times when her athletes told her how much of an impact she had on their lives. Current MCC tennis coach TJ Carter, one of multiple players who competed for McPhail at MCC who later became tennis coaches, remembers McPhail for the tough love she showed her athletes.

“Very old-school and expected things to be done in a certain way, but with excellence,” Carter said. “That showed through in our play and her record and championships.”

Carter attended Saturday’s induction banquet at the River Hills Club in Jackson, and he said he was proud to see her be recognized for the hard work and love that she put into her tennis program and her players. He said he was particularly proud of her because she has found a lot of success coaching a sport typically dominated by male coaches, and he was honored to have played a role in her successes as one of her former athletes.

“I had good high school coaches too, but she’s a major reason I went into coaching, just her passion for college-aged kids and making a difference in their lives,” Carter said. “I wanted to stay around the game I love at a high level, but at the same time, impact college kids who are in probably the most pivotal stage of their lives, and that was just from seeing how she loved and cared for everybody.”

Pete Mazzella, the Director of Tennis at Northeast Park Tennis Center, met McPhail about 15 years ago through his role as Newton County Academy’s tennis coach. He said it was one of the greatest honors he had ever been given when she came to his courts to ask him to introduce her at the Mississippi Tennis Hall of Fame induction, as he has long looked up to and learned from McPhail.

“Work ethic is probably the biggest thing. Her work ethic, and she’s a great communicator,” Mazzella said on why McPhail was a successful coach. “If you’ve got those two things as a coach, you’re going to be successful, and she’s such a great competitor.”

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