Frosh survived Katrina

Not long after their relatives and friends abandoned New Orleans for higher ground, freshman Alex Faust of the men's tennis team and his family decided to ride out Hurricane Katrina. They buckled down for the storm in a room on the seventh floor of Memorial Hospital in the heart of the city's east bank.

The Fausts decided to stay by the side of their grandparents, who would have had trouble evacuating the city, at the hospital where Faust's father was a pathologist. That decision, he later said, was "probably a mistake."

In the aftermath of the storm, the priority for FEMA rescuers was to evacuate patients from the hospital, and only when the patients had been transported were the medical staff and their families allowed to leave. The storm landed on Sunday, and the buses did not arrive until Wednesday to take the patients out, Faust said. The transport buses were supposed to take patients far out of the city to other hospitals but instead dumped them at the city's overcrowded and neglected convention center.

Four long days after Katrina made landfall, with sweltering heat, no running water and little, the Faust family left the hospital on a privately run airboat. From there, the journey continued on the back of a pickup truck that took the family to Baton Rouge, some 70 miles away from the life they had left behind.

Beaten but not broken down, Faust had to find a new school — his old one, Jesuit High, was under six feet of water — a new coach and a new set of practice partners to continue his tennis career. He ended up staying in Dallas with his aunt and uncle. Back in New Orleans, his house was being gutted and his school renovated.

Luckily for Faust, his cousins in Dallas played tennis and brought him to clinics to maintain his tennis skills in the first semester of his junior year. Faust wasn't able to travel to participate in tournaments, however, so he couldn't build up a ranking that would have attracted the attention of college recruiters. Without a ranking, he was often forced to play lower-tier tournaments before he was able to enter bigger ones.

After an unnoticed junior fall, the pressure was on. With his school renovated and reopened, Faust returned to New Orleans for the second semester of his junior year, determined to improve his ranking and get more tournament experience.

That was when Faust had the fortune to cross paths with David Schumacher, the head coach of the Tulane women's tennis team, who was without a school and a team. Schumacher dedicated his afternoons to coaching Faust and other area juniors, and that semester Faust put in more court time than he had before the storm.

With more practice and improved conditioning, Faust took his senior year by storm. He finished the summer ranked third in Louisiana and in the top 22 of the Southern Section of the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA). Later in the year, he tied for ninth place at the USTA Southern Closed Sectionals and went on to win four rounds at the USTA National Championships in Kalamazoo, Mich.

It was in Michigan that he caught the eye of Glenn Michibata, the men's tennis team's head coach. Having gone nearly a year without serious tournament play and a high ranking, Faust was still struggling to attract the attention of top college recruiters. Michibata, impressed with his on-court performance and knowing that Faust had been accepted to study at Princeton, approached him after one of his matches with an offer to play for the varsity tennis team.

Now, with his season just beginning, the biggest challenge for the Louisiana native is making the adjustment from the juniors to college tennis.

"It's definitely a step up," Faust said. "It's a lot more aggressive in college tennis ... It's something to get used to."