Bob Ryland
American tennis player
Robert Hayes Ryland (June 16, 1920 – August 2, 2020) was an American tennis player and coach, known for having been the first African-American to play professional tennis. Ryland coached some of the world's top-ranked professionals, including Harold Solomon, Renee Blount, Leslie Allen, Arthur Ashe, Bruce Foxworth, Venus Williams, and Serena Williams. Ryland also taught and coached at clubs in Bermuda, Puerto Rico, St. Alban's Tennis Club in Washington, D.C., and the Mid-Town Tennis Club in Manhattan. Ryland was inducted into the Wayne State University Athletic Hall of Fame (1991), Black Tennis Hall of Fame (2009), and the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame in 2002, where he also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
Early life
Ryland was born in Chicago in 1920. After his mother and twin brother died of pneumonia when he was a baby, his father Robert sent him to live with his grandmother in Mobile, Alabama where he helped his great-grandfather pick cotton. When Ryland was 10 years old, he returned to Chicago to live with his father and started playing tennis. Ryland attended Tilden Tech High School in Chicago, and while a student there won both the Illinois State and junior ATA singles titles.
College years
After graduating from high school, Ryland received a scholarship to Xavier University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in New Orleans where his college tennis career started.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bob Ryland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.