Rice University Men's Tennis

C-USA Coach of the Year 2016, 2017 AAC Coach of the Year 2025 Ustundag earned Coach of the Year honors for the third time in his career after the Owls rattled off three-straight victories against higher-ranked and higher-seeded teams in the AAC Tournament to capture its first American Athletic Conference championship, becoming the only team in Rice Athletics history to win a conference championship in all four conferences the Owls have been members of (SWC, WAC, C-USA, AAC). The title earned Rice its first back-to-back trips to the NCAA tournament since 2016-17. Ustundag enters his ninth season as the Owls head coach looking for his squad to recapture some of the momentum of the 2018-19 season after seeing the 2020 dual and fall seasons wiped out due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Owls return to action for the 2021 dual season after a fall limited to just a pair of matches at the Texas Regional before the team was recalled due to contact tracing. The Owls' 2018-19 season saw them Owls finish at 14-13 and produce the conference player of the year in Sumit Sarkar. Sarkar became only the second Owl to capture C-USA top honor in tennis, joining Bruno Rosa in 2010. He completed his season by earning the Owls’ first NCAA singles berth since Rosa in 2010. A two-time winner of the C-USA Coach of the Year award, Ustundag lead his team to consecutive conference titles in 2016 at George R. Brown and in 2017 when the Owls staged a memorable rally to down ODU in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Th

Bojan Szumanski heads into his 13th year with the program and his third as the Owls' associate head men's tennis coach. During his 13 years on South Main, Sz...

Juuso Laitinen is in his third year as a volunteer coach for the Owls. The native of Kuopio, Finland originally came to the Gulf Coast in 2012 to play tennis for Lamar University where he was a five-time All-Southland Conference selection while leading the Cardinals to back-to-back conference titles for the first time in over 40 years. He was a member of the Cardinals’ 68th-ranked squad that defeated the 28th-ranked Owls, 4-1 in Beaumont in 2016. He graduated from Lamar with a degree in Exercise Science & Fitness Management in 2015 while competing for the Cardinals. Laitinen began his coaching career after completing work on his Master’s in Kinesiology from Lamar in 2017, coaching at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in Maryland until returning to South Texas as a coach at the Giammalva Elite Tennis Academy in September of 2020. He holds certifications as a strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS), functional strength coach (CFSC) and from the USTA High Performance Coaching Program (HPCP).

Solomon Tat is in his fourth year as director of sport performance coach for women's basketball at Rice University. He was named to the position on June 2, 2021. Before accepting the position at Rice, Tat was the associate director of performance and director of training and education for the Liberty University athletics department. At Liberty, Tat supervised and managed the training efforts of three teams. He was primarily responsible for the implementation of performance training programs for men's soccer, women's basketball and volleyball. Tat, a former basketball player at Virginia, was the head performance coach for the men's basketball, cheerleading, and assistant coach for football from 2013-2015. Tat, who is from Nigeria, earned a bachelor's degree from Virginia in 2010 and a master's degree from Liberty University in 2013. He lettered four times as a member of the Cavaliers' men's basketball team and was a team co-captain for the 2009-10 season. Tat and his family reside in Houston, TX.