(Photo: Sun Devil Athletics)
TEMPE — It felt like an eternity as Matt Hill and his mother, Diane, awaited the X-ray results of his injured right knee. Matt thought he had a sprain, maybe even a tear.
Finally, the doctor returned.
“Look I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve seen this twice,” Dr. Gordon said.
The doctor told Matt and Diane to rush to the hospital. He was about to receive the news that would change his life — first for the worst, eventually for the better.
At the age of 19, Hill was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called osteosarcoma.
It should then come as no surprise that the man charged with recreating the ASU tennis team is not bothered by that challenge.
Not Making a Mountain out of a Hill
Hill almost seemed proud reminiscing about what could have been the worst moment of his life, during a recent interview in his office located within the Whiteman Tennis Center.
“Now, I think getting cancer was the best thing to happen to me,” Hill said.
Hill was coaching the East Lansing High School junior varsity girl’s tennis team, a job he had reluctantly accepted. While at a tournament in Portland, Michigan, he suddenly experienced a pain in his right knee so severe he could hardly walk.
Hill called his mother in disbelief. “I don’t think I can make it through the day,” he told her. “I can barely walk.”
Still, he assumed he strained or perhaps tore a ligament in his right knee. That afternoon, his mother took him to his pediatrician who examined the injured right knee then said to put ice on it and keep it elevated when possible.
So, there it was. A favorable prognosis, right?
After a week of following the doctor’s instructions, Matt was playing beach volleyball with his college buddies when the searing pain returned. He called his mother again and reported much worse knee pain than a week earlier.
That’s when he got the X-rays and the life-changing news. Upon hearing the terrifying news — cancer — Hill passed out.
The oncologist, Dr. Kimberly Les, explained to Hill and his parents that the diagnosis was osteosarcoma, a tumor in his right knee. Osteosarcoma is the most common type of cancer that develops in bones and is most common in children, according to the American Cancer Society.
“It was weird,” Hill said. “I wasn’t out long and so when I woke up they start talking about the protocol and it was just a research-based protocol for osteosarcoma. They didn’t have a really good map of what they were going to do.”
If the tumor stayed in his knee, he had about a 70 percent chance of living. If it spread, he had a 70 percent chance of dying, which meant chemotherapy had to start right away.
Hill’s life hung in the balance. His situation could’ve gone either way.
Weathering the Storm
The next year of Hill’s life was brutal to say the least and it challenged him in ways he couldn’t imagine.
There were times he thought he couldn’t do it, when he thought cancer would ultimately win the fight. When he was going through chemotherapy, there wasn’t much information on how much to treat patients to properly combat the aggressive disease.
“Back then it was just, ‘Let’s give him as much as we can on the edge of killing him,’” Hill said. “They said if they gave my dad two doses of what they gave me it would kill him.”
He had chemotherapy sessions three out of four weeks each month and his body reflected it. Hill dropped from 150 to 110 pounds. His hair fell out and he had to use crutches to walk. Quite the difference from the carefree guy who’d played tennis his entire life.
At 19, and in the midst of his sophomore year at Michigan State, Hill found it extremely difficult to suddenly accept this new reality. He wasn’t playing tennis or beach volleyball. He couldn’t hang out with friends. He instead spent his days in a hospital bed with more time on his hands than he would’ve liked.
“During that time, all you can do is sit around and think,” he said. “I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t do anything so I was constantly thinking and evaluating. With my brain, I’m always planning for the future.”
Hill was mostly confined to a hospital room or his house during this dark period in his life. One day, his father, Chuck, wanted to get him up and out of the house so he took him to a Michigan State men’s tennis match.
As he watched the players compete, Hill had an epiphany. “Why would I want to be a high school teacher when I could coach college tennis?” he thought.
Hill had always planned to become a high school teacher, even though his mother always urged him to go back to the club he trained at growing to teach what he knew – — tennis. During his sophomore year at Michigan State, the East Lansing High School girls’ varsity head coach asked him to become the head coach of the girl’s junior varsity team. It wasn’t too appealing, but Hill just wanted to make a bit of extra cash, so he took the job.
During the Michigan State match, Hill became infatuated with the idea of coaching college tennis, so infatuated he hobbled over to Gene Orlando, the Michigan State men’s head coach to ask for advice.
“At this point, I’m 110 pounds, no hair from chemo, white as a ghost, on crutches and the guy is looking at me like I was crazy,” Hill said.
Orlando kept Hill honest saying, “Hey you have to have played college tennis to coach college tennis.”
The longer Hill thought about it, the more he realized he wanted the future job anyway.
“When I got sick I thought, ‘If I get through this, I’m going to do something that I really, really enjoy,” Hill said. “That’s when I realized I had been enjoying coaching and had a real passion for it. How could I do this knowing that I’m going to have a titanium knee?”
Hill hung around the Spartans’ matches more often and eventually some of the assistant coaches noticed a certain quality in him.
“They could see he had a gift, how he taught and how he encouraged people,” Diane Hill recalled.
Those same coaches told him he should look into applying to Ferris State University — which has a professional tennis management program — when he became healthy enough.
Eventually, after the chemotherapy worked and removed the tumor, Hill made the leap of faith and decided to go Ferris State University to both play on the men’s tennis team as well as study the game of tennis.
The disease he thought could end his life actually saved it.
“I was not on a good path prior to this,” he said. “I wasn’t a straight-A student at Michigan State. My life was a mess.”
Hitting the Reset Button
Hill’s life essentially restarted in his mind and his passion led to one achievement after another.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in business marketing with a specialization in professional tennis management. Then, Hill earned a master’s degree in human performance at Alabama, while working as the Crimson Tide men’s tennis team as a volunteer assistant coach.
After completing his master’s degree and serving as an assistant, Hill was hired by another SEC school, Mississippi State University, to serve as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator. Hill’s success was rapid as he brought in the 13th-ranked recruiting class in the country just one year after arriving at MSU.
His brother and former hitting partner, Chip, says Hill is the perfect recruiter because he’s the epitome of a “player’s coach.”
“He’s one of those guys where you talk to him and he makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room,” Chip said. “He definitely wants to do what’s best for you and from a coaching perspective, he can be your coach but he can also be your friend.”
In five years, the Mississippi State program went from a final ranking of No. 58 in 2008 to a final ranking of No. 11 in 2012. Hill’s success wasn’t close to stopping. Eleven years after thinking his life might end, Hill finally was hired to become the head coach of the men’s team at the University of South Florida.
He led USF to three consecutive American Athletic Conference championships in four years with the Bulls, as well as a program-best ranking of No. 13 in 2016. Hill was named three-time American Athletic Conference Coach of the Year while redefining the Bulls tennis legacy.
From coast to coast, college coaches took note of Hill’s accomplishments.
Being a college coach is not any easy job, longs hours are spent traveling, recruiting, scheduling and budgeting. Not to mention the head coach is managing the lives of the athletes, many of whom come from outside the United States.
“A lot of times you have coaches that face adversity in health or the loss of a loved one and they have to go into some other line of work because it’s really tough to sustain that mentality and be good at it,” said Pablo Pires de Almeida, the head coach of the University of San Francisco men’s team.
He added that for Hill to “sustain the high level he has, shows a lot.”
After the 2016 season, Hill was offered the head coaching position at Arizona State University, a school that hadn’t had a men’s tennis program for nearly 10 years but held a rich history.
He was at a major crossroad.
The safe choice was obvious. He could stay with the program he took from dormant to competing for a national championship or risk it all and try to take on the second-biggest challenge he’d ever face.
Hill didn’t make the decision then. He didn’t make it one week after or even two.
He had made it 11 years ago when cancer had altered his outlook on life.
While lying in the hospital bed during many dark days, Hill made himself a promise. He would never shy away from any challenge, but would embrace it head on and put his best foot forward.
So, when he was pondering whether to build the Sun Devils from the ground up, he knew it would be difficult. But he was sure he could handle it.
“Not every coach would want to start from scratch with a team,” Diane said. “That would be a hard task for some coaches.”
Hill isn’t most coaches.
In 2016, he accepted the job, moving across the country to Tempe, where he was ready to re-establish the Sun Devil tennis program that would begin competing in matches again starting in 2018.
Hill, who is well-known as a strong recruiter, landed the No. 5 recruiting class in his first year at ASU, according to the Tennis Recruiting Network.
One of his recruits, Benjamin Hannestad, a freshman, committed to Hill when he was at USF and followed the head coach all the way to ASU when Hill landed the job.
Hannestad said Hill’s battle helped put member’s issues in perspective.
“We can’t have the audacity to complain about dialing in and going to work every day, there are no excuses that are good enough when you compare it to what Matt has been through,” he said.
Hill’s journey is an example of how life can change instantly. One warm, fall day in East Lansing, Michigan, he was playing beach volleyball with his college friends. Life was perfect.
Just a week later, he was staring straight up at a building sign that read Cancer Care.
“That’s when it hit me, when I was walking into the building and read those words,” Hill said.
His life was forever changed. He couldn’t see it at the time, but his battle would ultimately lead his charge into a dream career.
