As Britany Lau entered her senior year at Brown in 2022, she mulled a tennis future rife with uncertainty.
Now a Northwestern graduate student entering her final season of college tennis, Lau pondered walking away from the competitive game long before her final chapter.
While Lau was fresh off an All-Ivy First Team nod as a junior, she found herself with limited time remaining in Providence, despite possessing an extra two seasons of collegiate eligibility.
Since the Ivy League prohibited participation beyond an athlete’s senior year, Lau weighed whether she would complete her undergraduate degree at Brown and move on from tennis or if she would transfer to continue playing the sport she’d played since age 10.
“The year above me, they made an exception that if you were in those COVID years, you could use it at an Ivy, but starting my year, you couldn’t,” Lau said. “So my plan was just to find a job and just to go into corporate life.”
Three years earlier, Lau stepped into Brown’s program alongside head coach Lucie Schmidhauser, whose first season coincided with Lau’s freshman campaign. Through the thick of it, the two developed a close bond.
Schmidhauser watched a star blossom in three winding years. With Lau winning 16 matches in singles and doubles apiece during her junior campaign, Schmidhauser urged Lau to extend her collegiate career.
“I told her, ‘Hey, you have these amazing results, and you have the opportunity,’” Schmidhauser said. “If you have the opportunity and you can continue to study at a great university and have your education paid for, why wouldn’t you do that?”
Lau entered the transfer portal during her senior season — a year in which she earned another All-Ivy First Team bid and totaled 35 wins between singles and doubles. The Bears went 18-7, earning their third most wins in program history, and secured a second-place league finish for the first time in more than 25 years.
During the season, Lau received phone calls from coaches across the nation who sought her talent. The former five-star recruit fielded many inquiries, including her pick of SEC and ACC powers that had not reached out to her when she first went through the recruiting process.
But Lau pivoted elsewhere. She looked toward the Midwest, crossing paths with one of the college game’s most prominent talent developers.
***
Lau knew a better opportunity was out there somewhere, and she had to find it herself. She expressed her interest in Northwestern, a program that reached 23 consecutive NCAA tournaments under coach Claire Pollard.
“If I was going to do a fifth and sixth year, I wanted to be at a school that was great at tennis, obviously, but also I was looking for that academic aspect,” Lau said. “Northwestern kind of hit both those targets for me, and there weren’t that many schools that did that.”
Schmidhauser called her longtime colleague Pollard to inform her of Lau’s desire to join the Wildcats. She heaped significant praise upon her multi-time All-Ivy League star. After this call, Schmidhasuer passed along Pollard’s contact information to Lau, and the two quickly connected.
Years before, Pollard watched Lau compete at the junior level — though she never actively recruited the Kinnelon, New Jersey, product. After initial conversations went well, the five-time Big Ten Coach of the Year boarded a flight to Providence to watch her potential graduate transfer play tennis in person.
During her short stay in the northeast, Pollard watched Lau train in multiple practice sessions, and the level of tennis met her standard to extend an offer.
“I felt like Lucie was really on point,” Pollard said. “At the end of the day, results speak volumes. You can love a player and enjoy watching them, and you can love them as a person, but at the end, they (have) to produce results. And her results were just good.”
A 3-match singles and 5-match doubles win streak bookended Lau’s Brown tenure as she helped guide the Bears to their best season of the 21st century.
While her career at Brown had ended, Lau soon actualized a childhood dream of playing at a major Division I school.
Two weeks after Lau walked off of Brown’s commencement stage with her degree in Health and Human Biology, she arrived in Evanston for the summer and geared up for two years of Big Ten tennis.
***
During her career at Brown, Lau always played in the top half of the lineup in singles and doubles. She was at the No. 1 singles slot for her entire junior year and No. 1 doubles slot for her full senior campaign.
In NU’s first dual match of the season against Florida Atlantic in 2024, Lau watched from the sidelines in singles — a complete role reversal of her experience as a Bear — and cheered on her teammates.
“It really made me focus on myself and control what I can control,” Lau said. “It was definitely a little bit difficult, especially just having a very successful career at Brown.”
Lau’s Wildcat debut in singles came against Butler a few days later, where she exemplified her all-conference pedigree with a 6-1 doubles win and 6-2, 6-1 singles win.
As the regular season progressed, Lau fluctuated in and out of Pollard’s singles but soon became a mainstay in the NU doubles lineup.
Teaming up with All-Big Ten talent Maria Shusharina at the No. 3 slot for nearly the entire campaign, the duo went 18-1. Lau went 19-1 in doubles over the dual season, the most doubles wins by an NU player since the pandemic that allowed her to become a Wildcat.
“We were a lock at three,” Pollard said. “It was such a luxury to have that. We never took it for granted. Certainly, it was outstanding. (Lau’s) a phenomenal doubles player.”
As conference play got underway, Pollard inserted Lau into the No. 6 singles slot in the lineup and stuck by it. Lau played 10 of the final 11 matches of the season in this role, finishing with a 7-3 record.
During the start of her college tennis career at Brown, Lau’s freshman season stopped in its tracks. Her sophomore campaign spanned just one match in April. Years in advance of fighting to obtain the No. 6 singles spot, Lau went through adversity in a different sense.
And all the pandemic did was make her love tennis more.
“It just made me want to play even more because I was seeing all these other schools still playing and competing,” Lau said. “I think that kind of just motivated me more.”
Spectating from the sidelines for much of the start of the season was more adversity. During most nonconference singles matches, Lau focused on supporting her teammates as a vocal leader.
In the same way that the pandemic fueled her, not finding a place in the singles lineup forced her to up her level.
“It created these demons I had to work through myself and really had to kind of rely on myself on,” Lau said. “There were definitely positives and negatives to it, but I think that experience has definitely made me tougher and definitely made me more motivated in a way.”
While she helped usher in a program resurgence at Brown, Lau never reached the NCAA tournament. At NU, she accomplished this longtime goal by helping the ’Cats earn a postseason bid after the program missed the stage for the first time since 1998 in 2023.
***
Lau notched a 6-4 doubles win and a 6-2, 6-4 singles victory in the NCAA tournament’s opening round against Arizona State. She called it a “surreal experience,” but NU lost 4-3 to the Sun Devils.
Lau completed her first season with the ’Cats with a combined 28-5 singles and doubles record during the dual season, which would appear to be an enormously successful campaign.
But upon the season’s conclusion, Lau put her racquet down temporarily, stepping away from the sport she’d poured countless hours into since elementary school.
“I took a mental break over the summer,” Lau said. “What I was struggling with the year before, I really just pressed the reset button and tried to get my own demons out.”
She played less tennis while completing an internship with the global biopharmaceutical company Takeda.
And it worked.
Pollard dubbed Lau the team’s fall season MVP when she spoke to The Daily in November. Lau was the lone NU player to qualify for the ITA Central Sectional Championship in singles, where she also reached the semifinals in doubles alongside freshman Mika Dagan Fruchtman.
Before the season began, Pollard asked Lau if there was anything that she could do for her. Lau’s response was simple: “Please don’t talk about my backhand.”
Pollard obeyed, and evidently, this lack of communication worked like magic, resulting in Lau playing, what Pollard calls, the best tennis of her life.
“She was just so different in her confidence level,” Pollard said. “She was aggressive. She was physical. She took great ownership in her game.”
Entering fall practices, Pollard and her assistant coaches Ellyse Hamlin and Georgia Munns prepared a list of doubles combinations they wanted to try together before the season. Nowhere on that list was the combination of Lau and Dagan Fruchtman.
In rotating doubles pairings in practices, the coaches saw the duo play a few points together and realized they had stumbled upon something special. Lau and Dagan Fruchtman were meant to play together, it had appeared.
“She just knows what I’m going to do,” Dagan Fruchtman said. “She’s so smart on the court. She’s so talented, so I just know I can trust her one hundred percent when she’s serving, or when she’s in the back and I’m in the volley. She can understand how I feel or what I think to do only from looking at my face.”
The two reached the semifinals in the ITA Midwest Regional Championship prior to accomplishing the same feat in the ITA Central Sectional Championship. They were named alternates for the NCAA doubles tournament in the fall.
On the doorstep of her final dual season, Lau is set to do exactly what she did for years for Schmidhauser’s squads at Brown: be a leader. As one of Pollard’s most seasoned veterans, Lau has taken significant strides in finding her voice.
“One of my strengths is leading by example, and I think I try to do that every day with my effort, my work ethic,” Lau said. “I’ve worked on being more of a vocal leader as well and just really being able to help the underclassmen navigate anything that they need help with, even though I didn’t go to undergrad here.”
As NU enters the dual season, Pollard has made her goal of being a top-25 team that can win NCAA tournament matches clear.
Lau, who nearly didn’t even make it to Northwestern without a push from Schmidhauser, might want to accomplish that objective more than anybody else.
“I’m just excited to have the chance to try to make the tournament again to be in that position,” Lau said. “It was just really cool — I would say a little bit surreal — but it’s something that makes college tennis so exciting.”
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— Women’s Tennis: Northwestern prepares for dual season with Quad Invite
— Women’s Tennis: Pollard faces lineup dilemmas as dual season draws near
— Women’s Tennis: Pollard reflects on fall season process and results, looks forward to dual season
