Co-workers turned co-champs: Lex tennis coaches pair up to win mixed doubles in NJ tourney
LEXINGTON – Don’t feel too sorry for Ula Ezike.
She and partner Cooper Remy lost by tiebreaker in Monday’s finals of mixed doubles in the 92nd News Journal Tennis Tournament, but maybe it’s a good thing.
Even a great thing.
On the other side of the net were Hayliegh Tucker and Jansen Webster, her tennis coaches at Lexington. Can you imagine how torturous Friday’s first practice of the 2025 high school season would have been had Ezike been on the winning end of that match?
Can you even call it practice if all you’re doing is running for two hours straight?
“Now that I think about it,” Ezike said, grinning, “it could have been bad.”
Fortunately for her, everything worked out (wink, wink) in the end inside Lakewood Racquet Club.
Ezike and Remy had a 4-3 lead in the first-to-five match, but Tucker and Webster avoided what would have been a disastrous service break, pulled even at 4-all and then jumped out to a 5-1 lead en route to a 7-3 victory in the decisive tiebreaker.
Ezike, who will play No. 1 singles this fall for Lex after winning a sectional singles title last season, admitted it was nerve-wracking playing for a championship against her coaches.
“They know me,” she said. “They know all my weaknesses and strengths. But I feel I played really good, especially when I was at the net.”
Ezike felt even better about losing once she found out it was Tucker’s first mixed doubles title in this tournament after reaching the finals three other times, including one other time with Webster.
“O-kaay,” she said, smiling. “Congrats, Hayliegh!”
Ezike will be among six seniors on Lex’s roster, one of the reasons optimism on the team is so high. Hannah Remy, Lilly Thomas and Atlanta Hollister were three other Lex girls who played in the mixed doubles competition as a lead-in to a season Remy believes could result in reaching the Final Four of the Ohio Tennis Coaches Association team tournament.
The Lex girls won four state titles under coach Ron Schaub, the last one in 2012.
“It can be hard sometimes,” Remy, a sophomore, said about having co-coaches in Tucker and Webster, “but I like how they coach and their training. The training is the hard part. They make us run a lot. We do half a month of two-a-days (practices), but that really helps with endurance.”
Any way you look at it, competitively as players or collectively as mentors, their partnership works.
“It’s nice,” Remy said, “because Hayliegh definitely hypes us up and Jansen is such a good coach. He knows what to say and when to say it.”
This is the fourth year of the two-heads-is-better-than-one approach at Lex.
“I saw where Ron (Schaub) was retiring,” Tucker said, “so I texted Jansen. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we were the coaches?’ It wasn’t funny because we were the coaches two weeks later.”
Webster had already been working behind the scenes to make that happen.
“At that point, I had talked to (Lex athletic director) Jeff Eichorn and said, ‘I don’t know if I can swing it full time because of my (job). But once I found out Hayliegh and I could do it together, perfect,” he said.
Webster was already an assistant coach on Schaub’s staff and Tucker had just gotten her undergraduate degree at Notre Dame College and was working toward a Masters at John Carroll University in clinical mental health counseling.
Webster is the manager at Lakewood, where Schaub is the teaching pro and director of this tournament, and Tucker works at Catalyst Life Services as a child and adolescent therapist.
“I don’t think the way we coach together has changed much,” Tucker said. “How we approach things has changed, but our dynamic hasn’t changed at all.”
Tucker jokes about them being a “married couple.” They even finish each other’s sentences.
“We were friends beforehand,” Webster said, “so it was …”
Take it away, Hayliegh.
“… like hanging out with your best friend every day,” she said, seamlessly completing his thought.
Want to know when Webster won his other News Journal mixed doubles title, with Katie Volz? Ask Tucker. She fired off the answer so fast it’s as if she knew the question was coming.
“2018,” she said.
Why did you know that?
“Because I lost to him,” she said. “I was going into my senior year (at Lex).”
At that moment, Webster’s wife walked into the club.
“That’s his real wife,” Tucker said, grinning. “I’m his ‘other’ wife.”
They both starred for Schaub at Lex. Webster’s teams reached four Final Fours, winning one state title and playing for another. Tucker went to the Final Four her freshman year and her three others teams were denied a berth at state by Toledo Central Catholic
Splitting up their coaching duties happens organically. Webster has to close up at the club on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so if Lex has night practices those days, Tucker is in charge. If she has a conflict, Webster runs things.
They introduced two-a-days to the practice regimen when they took over and that’s how they’ll kick things off Friday. Next Tuesday, they’re taking the team to the Cincinnati Open, to watch the top men and women pros. They’ll make it a two-day trip so that they can scrimmage Cincinnati Princeton, where former Lex AD Joe Roberts has that same job.
“Jansen doesn’t like talking; he’s more technical and I’m more about getting (the girls) pumped up,” Tucker said. “He’s the technician and I’m the … therapist.”
Her degree is coming in handy.
And she can always fall back on her own experiences as a player, including those two-and-a-half hours Monday night when she and Webster were just a little bit better than everyone else.
Mixed dubs began with nine teams, with eight duos advancing to the quarters after three rounds of one set, no add matches. All matches, starting with the quarters, went to the first team to win five games. If a match was deadlocked at 4-all, a seven-point tiebreaker decided it.
Ezike and Cooper Remy beat Dr. Achilles Litao and Kayley Gimbel 5-3 in one semi, while Tucker and Webster eliminated Thomas and defending men’s singles champ Ethan Remy 5-2 in the other semi.
Cooper Brokaw makes a name for himself
Hannah Remy, who figures prominently in Lex’s plans this fall, reached the quarterfinals with Clear Fork’s No. 1 player Cooper Brokaw. In the old days, such a pairing probably wouldn’t have happened because Lex and Clear Fork were archrivals.
In this case, Brokaw chose Remy over his mom, Sue, who won three News Journal women’s singles titles (1993-95) when her surname was Beathler.
Thirty years ago, Sue would have had her choice of doubles partners. After graduating from Mansfield Senior, she played at West Liberty in West Virginia, reaching the nationals every year while playing No. 2 singles and No. 1 doubles.
“(Cooper) wants to hit hard, but he’s got a good backhand and he’s adding drop shots and all that,” said Brokaw, who assists Clear Fork head coach Aaron Wilson with the boys and girls teams.
Cooper, heading into his junior year in the valley, is the youngest of four siblings and only boy. His older sister, Riley, won women’s singles last year and plays for Ohio Wesleyan. Another sister, Aly, will be a senior at Clear Fork after making it to districts last season in doubles.
The improvement from Cooper and his team last spring was dramatic.
“My freshman year (2024) I didn’t do very good,” he said. “I finished seventh.”
This year he went from last at No. 1 singles to runner-up in the Mid-Ohio Athletic Conference Tournament as the Colts went from worst to first in the league.
In 2024, they were 0-12 in MOAC matches and 0-16 overall. This year they were 11-1 in the MOAC, winning the league title (based on dual matches) and the league tournament. Brokaw came within one win of reaching the district tournament.
“We would go out and hit, but I didn’t really force it on him,” his mom said. “I wanted him to want to play. Once he got to high school we started working on some stuff.”
This fall, Cooper will play soccer for the first time at the varsity level after playing golf last season. But his heart belongs to tennis.
“He had to play soccer because most of the boys he got to play tennis, so we’d have a team, were from soccer,” Sue Brokaw said. “So they said, ‘Well, we played tennis Cooper; now you have to play soccer.’”
NJ tourney to host OSU stars
If you love tennis or even if you’re just an Ohio State fan, you’re going to want to be at Lakewood on Thursday between 12 and 2:30 p.m.
OSU All-Americans Luciana Perry and Teah Chavez will hold a free clinic for young players the first hour and then play 2024 Lexington HS state champions Dylan Catanese and Ethan Remy in an exhibition doubles match, all as part of the 92nd News Journal Tennis Tournament.
Huge thanks to all four players for adding this tremendous twist to the tournament and multi-time NJ women’s champ and current OSU head coach Melissa Schaub (daughter of tourney director Ron Schaub) for sharing two of her top players from one of the nation’s best college programs.
This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Lex tennis coaches pair up to win mixed doubles in NJ tourney
