The thing that stood out about Sean Bailey, before you ever saw him play tennis, was that he was a gentleman.
Absolutely buttoned up. Yes-sir, no-ma'am, thank you very much for the opportunity. He is Canadian, so I suppose that might be a built-in feature, but it's always a delight to spend time with someone like that.
Then he'd step between the lines of the tennis court and something would happen. A transformation. The happy-go-lucky guy with the big smile would be replaced by a snarling bulldog with a wicked forehand, an on-court killer whose only desire was to bury whoever happened to be on the other side of the net.
Once he crossed the lines onto the court, Bailey was determined to dispel any notion that Canadians could be too nice.
Bailey was the No. 1 for a storied era of Austin Peay men's tennis which included three other players who earned four straight All-Ohio Valley Conference nods during their Governor careers. It culminated in one of the best career crescendos in Austin Peay history.
It started out well and just kept getting better for the Manitoba native. A second-team All-OVC honor for a freshman who spent 11 matches as Austin Peay's No. 1 as a teenager and was so successful he led the Govs to their first OVC Tournament appearance since 2005.
Three straight first-team All-OVC nods followed for Bailey, testament to his consistency and excellence. An incredible thing that stands out about Bailey is how often the phrases 'first' or 'only' pop up in a comprehensive analysis of his career. For all the success his peers enjoyed, Bailey was the prototype—the first player in program history with four All-OVC nods, the first player in program history with three CoSIDA Academic All-District nods. There had been a long stretch between true success for the men's program prior to Bailey's arrival; he played a large hand in ending it.
In his second season, Bailey won 21 singles matches and 20 doubles matches—a rare 20-20 season aided by an unbeaten singles mark in league play which helped bring the Govs back to the OVC Tournament. It's also telling that, by sheer accolades, this would wind up being the set-up season, the bridge between the precocious teenager who got the Govs to the precipice and the veteran who would eventually help bring home a title. Just a first-team All-OVC nod? Everyone's gap year between boy and man should go so well.
Bailey headed into his junior season with confidence, but earning the program's first OVC Player of the Year nod since 1983 may have caught everyone off-guard. Bailey was highly-regarded coming into the season, but ranked third—behind teammate Jasmin Ademovic—on the league's preseason top-10. He had moved to No. 3 to maximize his performance in 2011; how would he do re-assuming the top spot in the lineup as a junior?
Pretty well!
After spending a few matches at No. 2, where he went unbeaten in six matches, Bailey was the No. 1 pretty much from March through the end of the season and he was exemplary. He went toe-to-toe with 42nd-ranked South Alabama's No. 1, won in straight sets and from there he was off, rolling that victory into a 14-match win streak from February 25 into the OVC Tournament. He kicked off the OVC slate with three straight-set wins which saw him lose seven games—total—and he didn't lose a set at all in conference play. A loss in the OVC Tournament might have been a bitter pill on which to end the season, but there was no doubting Bailey—who was named Austin Peay's Most Outstanding Male Athlete in 2012—or the Govs heading into 2013.
His final Austin Peay campaign began with Bailey earning an OVC Scholar-Athlete honor and welcoming in a new head coach in Ross Brown. It ended in Starkville, Mississippi, with Bailey leading the Govs to their first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance.
In between, Bailey went 20-4, earned a third CoSIDA Academic All-District honor, was named First-Team All-OVC for the third time, helped author a 15-match winning streak for the Govs as a team and picked up a ring as the No. 1 for Austin Peay's first men's tennis championship since 1974. His losses came against Louisville (Big East runner-up), Samford (Southern Conference champions), Abilene Christian (defending NCAA Division II quarterfinalists transitioning to Division I) and Tennessee Tech (to OVC Player of the Year Syrym Abdukhalikov). If you wanted to beat Bailey, you needed your best players to have their best days and then some luck besides.
Most teams did not have that kind of luck. And Bailey capped his career by hanging a championship banner in the Dunn Center, then kept on winning after the season was over, earning both the OVC Steve Hamilton Sportsmanship Award—the first and only by an Austin Peay men's tennis player—and the second Academic All-American nod in program history as well. If there's an award Bailey was eligible to win, chances are he brought it back to Clarksville with him during the course of an outstanding career.
He will be remembered as the gentlemen tennis star at Austin Peay, which is fair and justified given his accolades and everything he did on and off the court (there was no easy way to shoehorn this in, but Bailey double-majored in French and corporate communication and graduated with a 3.95 GPA). But when the chips were down, Sean Bailey's only concern was sending his opponent back to the bench with sadness in his heart and a loss on his ledger.
