My Words: A Place That Believed in Me
By Maria Sholokhova, Women's Tennis
1/8/2026
I have lots of stories I want to tell you about all the experiences I’ve had during my tennis career, which began when I was 5.
How I started out in gymnastics when I was 4 only to have coaches back home in Sochi, Russia, tell me that I was too tall.
How I used to ride the bus with my mom to gymnastics practice only to find myself drawn to the outdoor tennis courts I saw along the way.
How I desperately wanted to try my hand at tennis, begging my mom to let me give it a shot until she said yes, then instantly falling in love with it.
It turned out to be the perfect sport for someone like me who’s an extreme introvert. I’ve never had many friends. Throughout my teenage years, I didn’t have anyone to invite to my birthday parties because I was so focused on tennis and academics.
Even now, being almost 22 and a senior in college, I don’t really have friends outside of my teammates on the Wisconsin women’s tennis team and my best friend back home, who has basically been my sister since I was 6.
My priorities haven’t changed even a little bit. The goal is to always to show up for my classes, get good grades and be the best version of myself on the tennis court.
I still believe that coming to the United States, to Madison and UW, was the best decision I’ve made in my life. To be honest, if I hadn’t come here to play Division I tennis I’m not even sure that I’d still be able to practice or play back home, not to mention my aspirations of a pro career.
In Russia, you can start playing in official tournaments when you’re 9, so that’s when I started competing. I pretty much started winning immediately and was soon ranked in the top three in my age group. From there, I began to play in European tournaments and soon I was ranked in the top five. Then it was on to international events.
Thinking about it now, I don’t even know how I got to the level I was at. Tennis is an extremely expensive sport and most people that become great at it come from wealthy families or have sponsors helping out financially. I had a long-time coach stop working with me when I was 15 because he had someone else who could pay him more.
So, for a year and a half, I basically set up practices with whomever I could find off the street to play with. I was structuring practices on my own and doing fitness drills on my own.
My dad Roman did his best to help. He was always extremely involved in my tennis career and tried to do whatever he could knowing how passionate I was about tennis.
My priorities haven’t changed even a little bit. The goal is to always to show up for my classes, get good grades and be the best version of myself on the tennis court.Maria Sholokhova
I started traveling even more when I was 14 – that’s the earliest you can travel alone out of Russia – playing in junior tournaments. I started living alone when I was 16.
I began to think about going to college in the U.S. when it got too difficult for me financially. There’s a big stigma in Russia about playing college tennis. All I’d heard back home was that people who go to college basically give up on their tennis careers.
However, in April of 2022, I decided that going to college in America was the best way for me to get good coaching and an education, which was important to me seeing how I’d graduated with straight A’s. That’s when I started thinking about studying English a little bit more. I never had a tutor and learned English on my own so as to pass the equivalency tests.
Stepping on such a big stage and holding up such a prestigious trophy felt truly surreal. For the first time in my life, I felt all the work I’d put in was paying off.Maria Sholokhova
Honestly, I’d never even heard of Madison or Wisconsin before I decided to come here. As it turns out, one of my Russian tennis partners, Alina Mukhortova, was here on the team. We played tournaments together when she was in Russia. She reached out to me a few times because the coach at the time, Kelcey McKenna, was interested in recruiting me. I had many offers from American colleges, but was extremely lost and had no idea what to expect. But at the end of the day, I decided to come to UW very late in August of 2022. I wound up arriving in Madison two days before school started.
Getting a visa was quite a stressful process. I was filling out forms on my own and couldn’t get an appointment, so I flew to Kazakhstan in late August without an appointment. I was hoping there’d be a random opening. I checked the website just before I left and they had an opening for the next day.
My first day in Madison was Sept. 2, 2022. I remember landing in Chicago feeling extremely excited and terrified at the same time. Coach Kelcey picked me up and we got here when it was dark. The next day I met my teammates and went to a Badgers football game. It was all new. I didn’t even know that American football even existed. To me, football was what they called “soccer’’ back home.
To say I was stressed out during my first semester would have been a major understatement. I’d always gotten a 4.0 grade point average in school up to that point, but coming here to a whole new culture and system wasn’t easy. My first semester I was pretty much crying every day. It was hard until I started playing in tournaments and started to have good results, but it took me almost my entire freshman year to adjust and finally find some peace.
It’s hard to choose a highlight from the 3½ years that I’ve been here, but one of the biggest was the day the Badgers were ranked 11th in the nation, the highest in nearly 30 years.
Another big moment for me so far was becoming the first UW player to win the Intercollegiate Tennis Association singles title, being an All-American as a junior and representing the Badgers in the NCAA Double Championships in November along with my partner Lucie Urbanova.
Stepping on such a big stage and holding up such a prestigious trophy felt truly surreal. For the first time in my life, I felt all the work I’d put in was paying off. Getting into an actual system was so important. I had a coach that not only cared about me, but believed in me and my tennis abilities.
So, you can imagine how painful it was when Coach Kelcey told us last summer that she was leaving to become the coach at Southern Methodist. It was a pretty tough time for me. I was very close with her. She was always so supportive and so helpful. I knew I could reach out to her with any issues that I had and I could lean on her.
After a long three weeks, we found out that when UW assistant coach Marek Michalicka was hired as our head coach. I felt so relieved. All the girls on the team love him. He’s such an incredibly kind person. Plus, he knows tennis inside and out having played here at UW and on the pro tour.
One of the big reasons I chose to come to Wisconsin was its academic reputation. I’m currently studying finance and real estate in the UW School of Business. I really like my classes. I’m enjoying all my professors, too.
Even though I lived on my own since I was 16, one of the hardest parts of being a student-athlete at UW is being so far from home. I’m very close to my mom, dad and my sister. I haven’t been home since the summer after my sophomore year, so I really miss them. It’s very hard to see your parents get older and you’re not able to see them for so long.
My current little dream is to somehow bring my mom, Irina, to Madison to see me graduate. I miss her terribly. She’s my best friend. I need to give her a hug, spend time with her and show her what my life has been like for the last four years.
That would make this whole experience worth it.
