Washington State tennis player Eva Alvarez Sande has had a college career full of success, from improving her match record year after year to making all-conference teams to the pinnacle: winning the NIT tournament last season.
Despite missing out on the NCAA tournament, the tournament win felt like she championed something else.
“That was a very special event and I feel like for the seniors last year, only two teams in the country are able to say goodbye to the seniors and end the season with a win, so that was definitely a great moment,” Alvarez Sande said.
Alvarez Sande won each of her six matches between No. 1 singles and No. 1 doubles in the tournament and has played in similar positions this season. Alvarez Sande plays in a high-pressure role and is coming up on the end of her senior season, just a week away from what could be her final college match.
While the sun is rapidly setting on her career, Alvarez Sande has stayed calm and has not let that distract her from focusing on tennis.
“I try to just focus on a daily basis. I try not to think too much ahead of myself to try and not put a lot of pressure on me,” Alvarez Sande said.
That composure doesn’t come naturally for the Spanish native though. Alvarez Sande gives herself the challenge of staying calm and focused every day through something else: balancing athletics with academics.
Alvarez Sande is a bioengineering major with minors in chemistry and mathematics. She said she felt well-prepared for her first two years of college, but the coursework became much more difficult in her junior and senior years. The challenge was not made any easier by her 18-credit class load and increased travel for more individual tournaments scheduled during the fall season.
On several plane trips, Alvarez Sande had to pay for Wi-Fi just to finish her work before the due date, and there were many times when she was overwhelmed.
“I’m not going to lie, some nights I stayed up a bit later than I should have,” Alvarez Sande said. “But I mean, looking back, I don’t regret it because I get to walk in a month with a major in bioengineering and two minors.”
Alvarez Sande stays true to her commitments, saying, “It was never an option” to choose between tennis and her academic success.
Coming from a mid-sized region in Galicia, Spain, Alvarez Sande played in smaller individual tournaments and made a close friend who would eventually inspire her to study abroad.
Alvarez Sande said Uxia Martinez Moral, who played for the University of Oregon from 2019 to 2024, told her nothing but positive things about playing college tennis, which pushed her early in her career to pursue the college path.
With siblings who also studied abroad and parents who told her that a sports career was never fully guaranteed, education, along with tennis, became a priority. That is also why Alvarez Sande was not afraid to shy away from an academic challenge.
“Given the opportunity to do both studying and playing tennis and with all the facilities that they give you here… I feel like it would have been a waste to try to do just something very simple that I didn’t really like, just to have an easy path,” Alvarez Sande said. “I’m really glad I chose that.”
With her bioengineering degree, Alvarez Sande hopes to pursue a healthcare career and is currently most interested in the prosthetics field. She hopes to gain some work experience after school, but wants to take time for herself first, traveling to California this summer with teammate Maxine Murphy before heading to Europe to reunite with old teammates.
While Alvarez Sande remains undecided on the future of her tennis career, she said she will always be involved with the sport, whether it be supporting her teammates or playing at local clubs. Regardless, there’s one thing she never wants to lose from tennis: the desire to get better every day.
“I feel like whenever I go onto the court, I’m always trying to get better and if I don’t feel like I practice well, I get frustrated with myself,” Alvarez Sande said. “That pushing myself to always, whatever I do, do it 100%…that’s the one thing I’m going to carry from tennis.”
