University of North Carolina Athletics
Photo by: Jeffrey A. Camarati
GoHeels Exclusive: Realizing Her Potential
April 27, 2018 | Women's Tennis, Featured Writers
By Pat James, GoHeels.com
Makenna Jones sat inside a classroom at the Loudermilk Center for Excellence on Tuesday afternoon, repeating the same words she's told so many people over the last two years.
"You don't understand, I should not be here."
Just two days earlier, Makenna, a sophomore on the North Carolina women's tennis team, completed a perfect 14-0 season against the Atlantic Coast Conference. She didn't know it then. But a few hours earlier, she moved into the No. 7 spot in the latest national singles rankings.
Her success shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The daughter of two professional tennis players, she was considered a blue chip recruit by tennisrecruiting.net when she enrolled at UNC.
This is where she knew she wanted to be. Some unexpected obstacles and a previous college commitment almost prevented that. But after she changed directions and her college future hung in limbo, she found a home here.
"There are so many reasons I shouldn't be sitting here doing what I'm doing," she said. "I should be somewhere else or have just a mess going on. But somehow I got lucky enough and it all worked out."
'A big tennis past'
About three days a week, Makenna returned home from school and received a text message. She already knew who it was from and what it would say.
"Today is the day we're playing," her mother, Tami Whitlinger-Jones, would write. "Get ready."
Makenna always went along. But for much of her youth, she said she never felt quite the same passion for tennis that her parents and so many other family members exuded.
Tami was a two-time All-America selection at Stanford. She then played nine years on the WTA Tour, competing in 38 Grand Slam tournaments, winning three tour titles and achieving a ranking as high as No. 41. Makenna's father, Kelly, won two NCAA doubles titles at Pepperdine. During his professional career, he reached No. 1 in the ATP Tour doubles rankings.
Tami and Kelly retired from professional tennis in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Makenna was born on Feb. 26 1998. Baby pictures show her in diapers, holding tennis balls. She can't remember life without a racket. But she also said she never felt pressured to play.
"To some extent, I almost felt proud of the fact that I chose it because none of my cousins or anything play," she said. "I'm the only one, and we had a big tennis past."
Finally, at the age of 10, Makenna played in her first tournament. She competed in no more than two each year over the next three years. Then one day, she wanted to quit.
She also played soccer and softball growing up. But if she was going to stop playing tennis, her parents said she needed to replace it with another sport. She didn't hate basketball. Yet she also knew she wasn't good at it. So without another option, she continued playing tennis.
Shortly after that decision, the family moved from Tampa, Fla., to Greenville, S.C., when Kelly became Furman's head men's tennis coach, a position he still holds. Makenna was entering eighth grade. And she opted to stop playing soccer and to start specializing in tennis.
Tennis, she said, allowed her to control her environment. With her parents as her coaches, she chose when and where practices were. She also decided how practices ran.
Her parents' mentorship also presented some challenges, though.
"Once I decided to get serious, they've been there, so they know what it looks like to take it seriously," Makenna said. "I just didn't know, and it was a lot. There were definitely some bumpy roads."
But as Makenna rapidly improved throughout high school, she said she and her parents started recognizing how far she'd come and how good she could be.
She won two state singles titles at Travelers Rest High School. In 2015, she received Southern Region Player of the Year honors and the South Carolina Wilton McKinney Award. All of her success, she said, felt surreal.
"I could have been terrible," she said. "I had some talent because I have good parents, I have good genes. But tennis is a unique game. It takes a unique person to be good at it. We kind of just let it go and let the ride happen."
It would be full of twists and turns from there.
'A very bizarre situation'
Makenna said she first wanted to attend Stanford. That, after all, is where Tami launched her professional career. But Makenna quickly realized she didn't want to travel so far from home.
That's when UNC entered the picture.
She'd formed a previous relationship with Hayley Carter. Although they weren't extremely close, Makenna said it was "enough to where I would bow to her." Makenna wanted nothing more than to play with her and the Tar Heels. And Chapel Hill was fairly close to home.
She and her father made an informal, two-hour visit one day. They spoke with Brian Kalbas and Courtney Nagle, toured campus by themselves and left after making a few purchases at UNC Student Stores.
"I was like, 'I'm going here,'" Makenna said. "And then I don't really know what happened."
For whatever reason, she said she felt like UNC wasn't interested. She wanted a school that was infatuated with her. That, she says now, might have been a byproduct of the attention she was accustomed to receiving from her coaches, then her parents.
Alabama kept recruiting Makenna, even as she took a break from looking at schools. She visited Tuscaloosa, Ala., in her junior year, she said, and "was just blown away by everything." Two months later, she committed to the Crimson Tide. She then signed her National Letter of Intent (NLI) on Nov. 13, 2015.
Alabama began the 2016 dual match season at No. 15 in the Oracle ITA Collegiate Tennis Rankings. But by April 5, the Crimson Tide sat at 4-13 and No. 56 in the rankings. Injuries played a factor. So, too, did "a couple of unfortunate scenarios," Makenna said.
Still, she sensed something wasn't right.
"I really honestly had not thought I would ever not go," Makenna said. "But I sat down and had to have a conversation with my parents because some people had been coming up to my parents and saying, 'Do you know what's going on?' We were just surprised because we kind of thought that maybe it was just in our heads or something."
She ultimately decommitted in May, and Alabama granted her a release from her NLI. With this all occurring so late in the recruiting cycle, she said she worried about potentially not attending college during the 2016-17 school year.
Several phone calls and emails followed over the next month. Even when the family went on a cruise, Kelly spent most of the time in the lobby, trying to figure out what to do. Pepperdine, Kelly's alma mater, alerted Makenna about an available scholarship. Maybe she was meant to end up in California after all, she thought.
Makenna hesitated to reach out to UNC. The Tar Heels' recruiting class was already full, she said. But her parents insisted that she contact Kalbas, and they told her they'd pay for her to attend Carolina, if that's where she wished to go.
Eventually, Makenna emailed Kalbas. He called her less than five minutes later.
"I was sitting with my mom on the couch," Makenna said, "and I was like, 'Mom, Brian is calling me. I can't answer this. I don't even know what I would say.'"
So she ignored the call.
She called her father for help, and as they spoke, Kalbas called Kelly. Makenna hung up. And after a few minutes went by, Kelly called Makenna back and broke the news. Alle Sanford, now a freshman at UNC, decided to defer her admission for a year. That made a scholarship available.
Makenna said she visited Pepperdine the next week. Upon returning to Greenville, she and her parents drove to Chapel Hill. She committed to Carolina on the spot, at Spanky's Restaurant and Bar on East Franklin Street.
"It was a very bizarre situation, and I try to not tell people too many bad things because I also feel what I did was not great," she said. "But looking back on it, it's the best thing that's ever happened to me."
But more adversity still awaited her.
Under pressure
Throughout her junior career, Makenna said she imagined she'd keep progressing and become one of the better players in the country. But the possibility of that seemed distant during her freshman season.
"I really just didn't even know if I was good enough to be better than I was at that moment," she said, "especially because who I was at that moment was very average, sometimes decent on a given day. … I wasn't coming up with the results."
And she became consumed by them.
Playing predominantly on Court 5 in singles, Makenna posted a 19-5 record in dual matches. That included an 11-2 mark in the ACC. Those losses sat with her, as she, like so many freshmen collegiate tennis players, faced the adjustment of competing for her team instead of just herself.
"I'm someone who puts a lot of pressure on myself," she said, "and with last year being Hayley's senior year and because I looked up to her so much, I couldn't have cared less about what happened to myself. I just wanted to win for her and make her senior year the best ever."
That, Makenna said, caused her to be emotionally unstable.
During the first round of the 2017 ITA National Women's Team Indoor Championship, the Tar Heels easily defeated Yale 4-0. Makenna's singles match went unfinished. But trailing 5-2 in the first set, she said she started crying hysterically.
She knew then something wasn't right with her, she said. So she and her parents contacted a family friend, a mental coach, who Makenna has worked with since then.
"I would just hate myself," she said. "I'd play matches and I'd just tell myself I'm terrible. How do you expect to be good when you're literally telling yourself you're bad?"
There's been little to criticize this season.
Realizing her potential
On a family vacation to Mexico last summer, Makenna's frustrations with herself and her game piqued.
Terrible practices, she said, had become normal. And during this one, she sat down during a water break, turned to her father and asked, "Do you think I can be good enough?" The question centered around her prospects of playing tennis professionally after college. But to do that, she needed to be good now.
"If I'm not going to be good enough, then so be it," she told Kelly. "I can have a future in something else; that's fine. But I've trained, I've worked so hard and I feel like I have the potential, but I'm clearly not reaching it."
Almost a year later, Makenna said she and her parents now consider that the defining moment behind her sophomore success.
Makenna and Kelly went and trained in Germany shortly after their conversation. They focused on breaking her game down to the basics, a task they accomplished by practicing on red clay courts, which slow the ball down and make points longer.
Playing in a different atmosphere helped, she said. But the most important development that came out of the trip was she started focusing less on results and more on improving.
"Sine then, my mindset in everything has been so different," Makenna said, "and that's a lot of what started in the fall is that I'd go into matches and I'd be like, 'I'm just trying to get better.'"
That adopted mantra worked.
Makenna went 10-2 during the fall season. After not qualifying for the Riviera/ITA All-American Championships as a freshman, she defeated two ranked opponents at the 2017 Championships. Her loss came against Florida Atlantic's Aliona Bolsova, the eventual runner-up.
The fall season helped build Makenna's self-confidence, she said. And it's continued growing since then.
Makenna started the spring 7-2, with one loss coming against Vanderbilt's Fernanda Contreras, who is currently ranked No. 9. From there, Makenna won 13 straight matches to end the regular season. She also became the first UNC player to post a 14-0 ACC record since Jamie Loeb in 2013-14, when Loeb was named ITA National College Player of the Year.
"She's playing well," said Kalbas of Makenna. "She's very confident and playing within herself. She has an understanding of how she wants to structure the points. I'm definitely proud of the way she's competing."
Makenna's play prompted a move from Court 2 to Court 1 after UNC's 4-3 loss against Georgia Tech on March 24. Entering the ACC Tournament, which Carolina begins against Wake Forest at 12:30 p.m. Friday in Cary, she's won all eight matches against the opponents' top singles players.
Carter provided nearly unprecedented stability at Court 1 over the last two seasons. Wins from her, Makenna said, were almost guaranteed. But Makenna added she tries not to think that way.
"Although it's amazing to be in her footsteps in a way, every match to me matters," Makenna said. "It's not just necessarily results, but just getting better and also enjoying it."
It took some time to do that. But she can now, exactly where she should be.
Makenna Jones sat inside a classroom at the Loudermilk Center for Excellence on Tuesday afternoon, repeating the same words she's told so many people over the last two years.
"You don't understand, I should not be here."
Just two days earlier, Makenna, a sophomore on the North Carolina women's tennis team, completed a perfect 14-0 season against the Atlantic Coast Conference. She didn't know it then. But a few hours earlier, she moved into the No. 7 spot in the latest national singles rankings.
Her success shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The daughter of two professional tennis players, she was considered a blue chip recruit by tennisrecruiting.net when she enrolled at UNC.
This is where she knew she wanted to be. Some unexpected obstacles and a previous college commitment almost prevented that. But after she changed directions and her college future hung in limbo, she found a home here.
"There are so many reasons I shouldn't be sitting here doing what I'm doing," she said. "I should be somewhere else or have just a mess going on. But somehow I got lucky enough and it all worked out."
'A big tennis past'
About three days a week, Makenna returned home from school and received a text message. She already knew who it was from and what it would say.
"Today is the day we're playing," her mother, Tami Whitlinger-Jones, would write. "Get ready."
Makenna always went along. But for much of her youth, she said she never felt quite the same passion for tennis that her parents and so many other family members exuded.
Tami was a two-time All-America selection at Stanford. She then played nine years on the WTA Tour, competing in 38 Grand Slam tournaments, winning three tour titles and achieving a ranking as high as No. 41. Makenna's father, Kelly, won two NCAA doubles titles at Pepperdine. During his professional career, he reached No. 1 in the ATP Tour doubles rankings.
Tami and Kelly retired from professional tennis in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Makenna was born on Feb. 26 1998. Baby pictures show her in diapers, holding tennis balls. She can't remember life without a racket. But she also said she never felt pressured to play.
"To some extent, I almost felt proud of the fact that I chose it because none of my cousins or anything play," she said. "I'm the only one, and we had a big tennis past."
Finally, at the age of 10, Makenna played in her first tournament. She competed in no more than two each year over the next three years. Then one day, she wanted to quit.
She also played soccer and softball growing up. But if she was going to stop playing tennis, her parents said she needed to replace it with another sport. She didn't hate basketball. Yet she also knew she wasn't good at it. So without another option, she continued playing tennis.
Shortly after that decision, the family moved from Tampa, Fla., to Greenville, S.C., when Kelly became Furman's head men's tennis coach, a position he still holds. Makenna was entering eighth grade. And she opted to stop playing soccer and to start specializing in tennis.
Tennis, she said, allowed her to control her environment. With her parents as her coaches, she chose when and where practices were. She also decided how practices ran.
Her parents' mentorship also presented some challenges, though.
"Once I decided to get serious, they've been there, so they know what it looks like to take it seriously," Makenna said. "I just didn't know, and it was a lot. There were definitely some bumpy roads."
But as Makenna rapidly improved throughout high school, she said she and her parents started recognizing how far she'd come and how good she could be.
She won two state singles titles at Travelers Rest High School. In 2015, she received Southern Region Player of the Year honors and the South Carolina Wilton McKinney Award. All of her success, she said, felt surreal.
"I could have been terrible," she said. "I had some talent because I have good parents, I have good genes. But tennis is a unique game. It takes a unique person to be good at it. We kind of just let it go and let the ride happen."
It would be full of twists and turns from there.
'A very bizarre situation'
Makenna said she first wanted to attend Stanford. That, after all, is where Tami launched her professional career. But Makenna quickly realized she didn't want to travel so far from home.
That's when UNC entered the picture.
She'd formed a previous relationship with Hayley Carter. Although they weren't extremely close, Makenna said it was "enough to where I would bow to her." Makenna wanted nothing more than to play with her and the Tar Heels. And Chapel Hill was fairly close to home.
She and her father made an informal, two-hour visit one day. They spoke with Brian Kalbas and Courtney Nagle, toured campus by themselves and left after making a few purchases at UNC Student Stores.
"I was like, 'I'm going here,'" Makenna said. "And then I don't really know what happened."
For whatever reason, she said she felt like UNC wasn't interested. She wanted a school that was infatuated with her. That, she says now, might have been a byproduct of the attention she was accustomed to receiving from her coaches, then her parents.
Alabama kept recruiting Makenna, even as she took a break from looking at schools. She visited Tuscaloosa, Ala., in her junior year, she said, and "was just blown away by everything." Two months later, she committed to the Crimson Tide. She then signed her National Letter of Intent (NLI) on Nov. 13, 2015.
Alabama began the 2016 dual match season at No. 15 in the Oracle ITA Collegiate Tennis Rankings. But by April 5, the Crimson Tide sat at 4-13 and No. 56 in the rankings. Injuries played a factor. So, too, did "a couple of unfortunate scenarios," Makenna said.
Still, she sensed something wasn't right.
"I really honestly had not thought I would ever not go," Makenna said. "But I sat down and had to have a conversation with my parents because some people had been coming up to my parents and saying, 'Do you know what's going on?' We were just surprised because we kind of thought that maybe it was just in our heads or something."
She ultimately decommitted in May, and Alabama granted her a release from her NLI. With this all occurring so late in the recruiting cycle, she said she worried about potentially not attending college during the 2016-17 school year.
Several phone calls and emails followed over the next month. Even when the family went on a cruise, Kelly spent most of the time in the lobby, trying to figure out what to do. Pepperdine, Kelly's alma mater, alerted Makenna about an available scholarship. Maybe she was meant to end up in California after all, she thought.
Makenna hesitated to reach out to UNC. The Tar Heels' recruiting class was already full, she said. But her parents insisted that she contact Kalbas, and they told her they'd pay for her to attend Carolina, if that's where she wished to go.
Eventually, Makenna emailed Kalbas. He called her less than five minutes later.
"I was sitting with my mom on the couch," Makenna said, "and I was like, 'Mom, Brian is calling me. I can't answer this. I don't even know what I would say.'"
So she ignored the call.
She called her father for help, and as they spoke, Kalbas called Kelly. Makenna hung up. And after a few minutes went by, Kelly called Makenna back and broke the news. Alle Sanford, now a freshman at UNC, decided to defer her admission for a year. That made a scholarship available.
Makenna said she visited Pepperdine the next week. Upon returning to Greenville, she and her parents drove to Chapel Hill. She committed to Carolina on the spot, at Spanky's Restaurant and Bar on East Franklin Street.
"It was a very bizarre situation, and I try to not tell people too many bad things because I also feel what I did was not great," she said. "But looking back on it, it's the best thing that's ever happened to me."
But more adversity still awaited her.
Under pressure
Throughout her junior career, Makenna said she imagined she'd keep progressing and become one of the better players in the country. But the possibility of that seemed distant during her freshman season.
"I really just didn't even know if I was good enough to be better than I was at that moment," she said, "especially because who I was at that moment was very average, sometimes decent on a given day. … I wasn't coming up with the results."
And she became consumed by them.
Playing predominantly on Court 5 in singles, Makenna posted a 19-5 record in dual matches. That included an 11-2 mark in the ACC. Those losses sat with her, as she, like so many freshmen collegiate tennis players, faced the adjustment of competing for her team instead of just herself.
"I'm someone who puts a lot of pressure on myself," she said, "and with last year being Hayley's senior year and because I looked up to her so much, I couldn't have cared less about what happened to myself. I just wanted to win for her and make her senior year the best ever."
That, Makenna said, caused her to be emotionally unstable.
During the first round of the 2017 ITA National Women's Team Indoor Championship, the Tar Heels easily defeated Yale 4-0. Makenna's singles match went unfinished. But trailing 5-2 in the first set, she said she started crying hysterically.
She knew then something wasn't right with her, she said. So she and her parents contacted a family friend, a mental coach, who Makenna has worked with since then.
"I would just hate myself," she said. "I'd play matches and I'd just tell myself I'm terrible. How do you expect to be good when you're literally telling yourself you're bad?"
There's been little to criticize this season.
Realizing her potential
On a family vacation to Mexico last summer, Makenna's frustrations with herself and her game piqued.
Terrible practices, she said, had become normal. And during this one, she sat down during a water break, turned to her father and asked, "Do you think I can be good enough?" The question centered around her prospects of playing tennis professionally after college. But to do that, she needed to be good now.
"If I'm not going to be good enough, then so be it," she told Kelly. "I can have a future in something else; that's fine. But I've trained, I've worked so hard and I feel like I have the potential, but I'm clearly not reaching it."
Almost a year later, Makenna said she and her parents now consider that the defining moment behind her sophomore success.
Makenna and Kelly went and trained in Germany shortly after their conversation. They focused on breaking her game down to the basics, a task they accomplished by practicing on red clay courts, which slow the ball down and make points longer.
Playing in a different atmosphere helped, she said. But the most important development that came out of the trip was she started focusing less on results and more on improving.
"Sine then, my mindset in everything has been so different," Makenna said, "and that's a lot of what started in the fall is that I'd go into matches and I'd be like, 'I'm just trying to get better.'"
That adopted mantra worked.
Makenna went 10-2 during the fall season. After not qualifying for the Riviera/ITA All-American Championships as a freshman, she defeated two ranked opponents at the 2017 Championships. Her loss came against Florida Atlantic's Aliona Bolsova, the eventual runner-up.
The fall season helped build Makenna's self-confidence, she said. And it's continued growing since then.
Makenna started the spring 7-2, with one loss coming against Vanderbilt's Fernanda Contreras, who is currently ranked No. 9. From there, Makenna won 13 straight matches to end the regular season. She also became the first UNC player to post a 14-0 ACC record since Jamie Loeb in 2013-14, when Loeb was named ITA National College Player of the Year.
"She's playing well," said Kalbas of Makenna. "She's very confident and playing within herself. She has an understanding of how she wants to structure the points. I'm definitely proud of the way she's competing."
Makenna's play prompted a move from Court 2 to Court 1 after UNC's 4-3 loss against Georgia Tech on March 24. Entering the ACC Tournament, which Carolina begins against Wake Forest at 12:30 p.m. Friday in Cary, she's won all eight matches against the opponents' top singles players.
Carter provided nearly unprecedented stability at Court 1 over the last two seasons. Wins from her, Makenna said, were almost guaranteed. But Makenna added she tries not to think that way.
"Although it's amazing to be in her footsteps in a way, every match to me matters," Makenna said. "It's not just necessarily results, but just getting better and also enjoying it."
It took some time to do that. But she can now, exactly where she should be.
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