Naomi Osaka's Hitting Partner on Personal Growth Through College Tennis

Summary

Karue Sell, former UCLA Bruin standout and current hitting partner for 2020 US Open champion Naomi Osaka, gives an inside view of professional hitting partner work and a passionate defense of college tennis as a vehicle for personal development. Sell, a Brazilian-born player, credits his four years at UCLA (under coach Billy Martin) with the maturity, fire, and resilience that allowed him to succeed on the professional tour where he believes he would have burned out at 20 without the college experience. He discusses the multi-cultural dynamics of Naomi Osaka’s team, the role of the hitting partner as a coach-adjacent feedback channel, and his deep concern about college tennis program cuts — framing it as an affiliation and identity problem for the sport, not just a financial issue. The episode also covers the case of Jen Brady (UCLA, 2020 US Open semifinalist) as evidence that the college pathway to professional success is real and underrepresented in tennis discourse.

Guest Background

Karue Sell is a Brazilian-born professional player and coach based in Los Angeles. He played four years at UCLA under head coach Billy Martin, then transitioned to the professional tour, where he rose to a career-high ATP ranking. He shifted toward coaching and was working with junior players when he was recruited by Naomi Osaka’s team in December 2019 to be her hitting partner. He worked with Osaka through the entire 2020 season — four tournaments including a US Open title. He previously worked at Pepperdine as a coach and runs junior coaching out of LA. He knows/knew John Copefer (Tulane) and Marcos Giron (UCLA), who both credit college tennis for their professional careers.

Key Findings

1. College Tennis Reignited Competitive Fire That Had Dimmed

Sell is direct about his mental state at 18: “I kind of had lost the fire a little bit. I was a good junior but I just didn’t have the innate desire to go play futures.” College gave him the context — a team, a national championship goal, teammates depending on him — that made competition meaningful again. He specifically loved the dual-match season (“I was locked in. I loved the dual season. I loved the team aspect of it.”) while acknowledging the individual fall season did not motivate him as much. His self-assessment: without UCLA, he would have quit by 20. With it, he was hungry and motivated at 24.

2. The Hitting Partner Role Is Coach-Adjacent, Not Subordinate

Sell describes a spectrum of hitting partner experiences. On some teams, hitting partners are told to “just shut up and make balls.” On Osaka’s team, both she and coach Wim Fissette (Belgian, age ~40) welcomed feedback. Sell’s input: observations about which shots he could easily exploit, when Osaka was really imposing herself, and what he saw developing over the season from January to the US Open. His framing: “I’m the guy who’s taking the beating pretty much. I can tell when she’s really, really improving certain things.” He would not have taken a role where his input was not valued — the learning opportunity, not just the résumé, drove his decision.

3. Multi-Cultural Team Dynamics Require Space, Not Assimilation

Osaka’s team is Japanese (Naomi and her mother Tamaki), Belgian (Wim Fissette), and Brazilian (Sell). He describes how they made it work: Naomi values personal space and does not require team togetherness all the time, which gives each person room to be themselves. The team spent a month in a house together during bubble life, which accelerated mutual understanding. Sell finds Europeans easier to relate to personally (his closest friends include French players), and credits the autonomy structure with enabling cross-cultural function without forcing uniformity.

4. The Post-Win Night: A Study in Professional Anticlimaxe

Sell’s account of the night of Osaka’s 2020 US Open win is deliberately anti-romantic: they were still in the bubble, could not leave, ordered pizza, drank tequila from the house bar, and Naomi was visibly exhausted. Sell’s insight: winning a Grand Slam is “a weight off your shoulder” — the celebration want isn’t there immediately because the emotional burden of competing at that level has been so sustained. He flew home to LA the next day to be with his puppy. The real celebration would have been a week later. This human reality of professional tennis rarely surfaces in broadcast coverage.

5. Team Affiliation Is the Key to Spectator Engagement

Sell makes one of the most analytically sharp observations in this collection of episodes: the core reason tennis struggles to build spectator engagement at the professional level is affiliation. “In team sports, you can affiliate yourself to your city. Your city has the Lakers — it’s much easier.” He contrasts watching a 5-hour individual professional match without personal connection to watching the UCLA vs. USC dual match — which he describes as “the most exciting 30 minutes of tennis I’ve ever watched” even as a trained tennis professional. His conclusion: the ATP Cup and Davis Cup show that when national or team identity enters, tennis becomes emotionally compelling in ways individual ranking events cannot replicate.

6. Jen Brady and John Copefer as the College-to-Pro Template

Sell argues that Jen Brady’s 2020 US Open semifinal run (at age 25-26, after UCLA) should shift how the tennis world thinks about the college pathway for women. He was at UCLA when Brady was there — she was playing position 3, not position 1, and was “almost like immature” in understanding the work required. He credits the college environment with giving her the time to develop without pressure, and notes her subsequent German preseason work ethic investment as the professional extension of what college taught her. Copefer at Tulane (went from relative obscurity to ATP top 100) is his second case study: “Who was Copefer before he came to Tulane? And holy cow.”

7. College Tennis Program Cuts Are an Existential Threat

Sell is alarmed by the program cuts of 2020 and sees them as potentially structurally permanent. His fear: tennis becomes like lacrosse — a sport with so few college programs that the pathway and the culture collapse. He points out that Minnesota’s program cut came when the team was ranked top 20 — “it makes no sense.” He uses financial logic: tennis costs roughly 1% of a university’s athletic budget. The cuts are pre-COVID budget decisions being executed under COVID cover. His responsibility call: alumni must speak out, not assume their programs are safe.

Actionable Advice for Families

• If your child has lost enthusiasm for tournament tennis at 17-18, do not assume this means they should exit the sport — college tennis’s team identity and national championship context rekindles competitive fire for many players who burned out on the individual grind
• Look for coaches and programs at all levels, not just the top ranked D1 programs — Sell’s point about Copefer at Tulane and Jen Brady at UCLA position 3 is that personal growth and eventual professional success are not correlated with playing position one or attending a top 5 program
• If you are an alum of a college tennis program, start giving money and attending matches now — don’t wait for your program to face a cut before demonstrating community value

INTENNSE Relevance

• Format innovation: Sell’s affiliation argument is the most direct conceptual validation of INTENNSE’s entire format thesis — team tennis solves the engagement problem that individual ranking events cannot; fans can identify with Atlanta, with a coach, with a roster, in ways that a ranking-based event forbids
• College-to-pro bridge: Sell himself is the INTENNSE target demographic — a player who had fire for tennis through age 24-25 post-college but found the financial difficulty of the individual tour unsustainable; an INTENNSE salary structure is exactly what would have extended his competitive career
• Broadcast/storytelling: The post-win pizza-and-tequila story illustrates why access to the team’s inner life is more compelling broadcast content than any highlight reel; INTENNSE’s team format creates these storylines organically
• Player development pathway: The Brady/Copefer examples validate INTENNSE’s sourcing strategy — the league should be recruiting players who graduated college at position 3-6 and improved dramatically over their college career, not just those who were ranked 1-2 and went pro immediately
• Competitive culture: Sell’s description of the UCLA-USC dual match as the most exciting tennis he ever watched — including professional matches — makes the case for why INTENNSE’s rivalry structure, regular season, and team playoff format will generate emotional investment that individual-format events cannot
• Mental performance: Sell’s framing that “matches are won with heart in college” translates directly to INTENNSE’s context — the format (team scoring, rally points, unlimited subs) creates pressure that rewards psychological resilience over technical precision alone

Notable Quotes

“At 18, I kind of had lost the fire a little bit. College gave me the team aspect. I loved the dual season. I was locked in.”

“I truly believed that I would have probably quit by 20. And this way, I was still hungry at 24.”

“Matches are won with heart in college at the end of the day.”

“In team sports, you can affiliate yourself to your city. Your city has the Lakers. In tennis, it’s hard to affiliate yourself — it’s an affiliation problem.”

“People are going to go watch a UCLA tennis match and they’re going to be into it. I walked in late and it was the most exciting 30 minutes of tennis I’ve ever watched.”

“A lot of players love playing those club events in Europe because they’re playing a team event and you make some money and you play for the team. We grow up — it is a loner sport — and then you’re almost injected with adrenaline playing for a team.”