A Tennis Pro Turns Fashion Pro
Jennifer Hopkins spent the last 19 years playing tennis (seven of these years were as a professional on the women's tour). Now retired from the pro tour, she hopes to spend the next 19 years—give or take a few—making tennis more stylish. Currently a student in the Fashion Design and Marketing program at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Tampa, Jennifer says today's tennis outfits are generally drab. She wants to be the one to change that.
"The Academy is teaching me what I need to know to do what I want," Jennifer says. "I have so much personal experience with tennis apparel, so I know what works and what doesn't. I know that most of the stuff that is out there today is generic. As far as athletes go, tennis players have more freedom than most with what they can wear. I'd like to design tennis clothing that takes advantage of that freedom—stuff that is more feminine and more attuned to what is interesting today."
Jennifer says that while her mother loves to sew, and while she herself has been interested in fashion since elementary school, she had never sewn anything before coming to the Academy.
"It was definitely intimidating to come into college and start something totally new, especially being 25 and out of school for a while," says the woman who has played at the U.S. Open, Wimbledon and Australian Open. "But, when classes actually started, I realized the teachers were here to help me and not to intimidate me."
Even though Academy teachers aren't intimidating, Jennifer still doesn't want to see them more than two days a week. Jennifer lives an hour's drive from the Academy's Tampa campus and prefers to pack all of her classes—she takes a full load each term—into two days rather than make the drive from Sarasota to Tampa every day. Jennifer was initially a little worried she might not be able to get the classes she needed on the days she needed, but that worry has been proven unfounded. "I've been able to get exactly the classes and the schedule I want for every term so far," she says. "And getting what I need has been easy."
"Looking at schools, IADT seemed like the perfect choice. Now that I'm here and learning about everything from clothing construction to proportions, I see I was right. I'm being taught everything I'm going to need to know to be successful at what I want to do, and I haven't yet come up with a question a teacher hasn't been able to answer. That sounds perfect to me."