University of New England

Hard to be Normal: Jill Davis, UNECOM Class of '10

[Editor's Note: This profile originally appeared in the September 2006 COMmunicator]

In the Court of Her Mind

It’s a form of psychosis, really. To batter balls against the garage door for hours on end until the drum of rubber on wood becomes another heartbeat and the creeping night swallows everything but the corner light. Normal doesn’t play a match before bed, game by game, set by set, against the world’s best – entirely in the court of her mind. Normal doesn’t wake before dawn to run blackened streets, or dance alone behind an empty net returning serves no one else can see.

Can your body recover from ten years of shrugged-off injuries, cortisone shots, and knee surgeries so routine they mark the calendar like Christmas? Can your mind adjust from a self-imposed pressure so intense and isolating it seems like a fusion furnace behind a moat? Can extraordinary become normal; can world-class become next-door neighbor? Jill Davis doesn’t know. She’s not really sure what normal is.

“I Wanted to go to the Olympics”

It started with swimming when she was eight. Things started badly; Jill didn’t know how to swim. Details aside, her mom signed Jill up for class and within a year or two she was tops in her region near Quakertown, Pennsylvania. “I wanted to be the best in whatever I did,” she recalls, “I wanted to go to the Olympics.” She was her age group’s state backstroke champion when she was 12. Such early success made her future seem clear as chlorinated water.

Two older brothers had already blazed intimidating trails through life. One aced nearly every standardized test and went to Harvard; the other was a creative genius who made movies, built a television set from scratch, and re-wired the family air-conditioning system to cool his own room. Jill’s parents instilled the ethic to be the best in whatever their children did. It was not enough to simply dabble. Jill believes this ethos came from the Depression-era difficulties both parents overcame. Wherever it originated, Jill could always count on two things from her parents: high standards and unwavering support.

Sudden Chutzpah

Jill attended the tennis match that changed her life with the same nonchalance that most specialized athletes reserve for any sporting event not their own. Her whole family played the game, but Jill was a swimmer – state champ, remember – and so when the Virginia Slims Women’s Tennis Championship came to town, Jill was nonplussed. Until, that is, she sat courtside to watch a match between Australian Leslie Hunt and an American named Billie Jean King. She had never seen anything like it.

“It was an epiphany for me,” says Jill, “I watched Billie Jean King’s aggressive serve-and-volley style and I was completely hooked. I knew that I wanted to play tennis and nothing else.” On the way home from the match, Jill looked at her parents and said, “I’m going to be the number one tennis player in the world. What are you guys going to do to help me?” Jill chuckles at her own chutzpah, but she was serious. She carried a tennis racket nearly 24-7 for the next 16 years.

Bruises and Limp Broccoli

Jill’s parents supported her decision to play tennis, and promptly signed her up for a clinic. “They didn’t push me,” says Jill, “I pushed them.” The first summer, she lost every match 6-0 6-0. “I was terrible,” she remembers, “but I loved it. I carried my racket to dinner with me.”

Her awful record reversed when she grew six inches in one year and a local tennis pro took her under his wing for free. Jill played with the boys on a regional team and suffered through drills that bordered on the sadistic. “We’d line up and volley at close range, absolutely drilling each other with the ball. That was part of the training. I was covered with bruises. But I got better.” Soon she had outgrown the local club and traveled to Philly to receive specialized coaching, then to New York City, then to California.

When she was 15, Jill began competing at the National level. To do so, she had to maintain her ranking as one of the top three players in the mid-Atlantic region. The pressure was tremendous. “You could never have a bad day - ever,” Jill recalls. “Every match was important; every player was good.” Fantastic expectations easily led to rapid burnout for some players, and Jill didn’t care to become another vegetable in the pressure-cooker of tennis. There can be a fine line between world-class and limp broccoli.  

Shadow-Tennis

To handle the pressure, Jill embraced a mental game that sets great athletes apart from good ones. “I began to run in the morning,” she says, “I didn’t need to do it, but I did. Rain, snow, in the dark, it didn’t matter. It made me stronger mentally to know that I was the best-conditioned athlete on the court.” She played shadow-tennis for hours, volleying and counter-volleying imaginary shots against invisible players. “That can’t be normal,” she laughs, “It must be psychosis. Can somebody recover from that sort of intensity?”

Every night she played an entire match in her mind before she went to bed. “I played every point against the best players in the world at the time,” she says, “and I never lost.” She trimmed every ounce of mental lassitude into the trash, and her game took off. Riding a tennis scholarship to SMU, Jill played #1 singles as a freshman and compiled the best record in school history. After her freshman year, she quit to turn pro. For the next ten years, Jill Davis was among the best tennis players in the world.

Pro

In the great tradition of circular reasoning, every pro tennis player needs a ranking in order to play in a professional tournament, yet one must play in a professional tournament to receive a rank. How did Jill crack this Catch-22? “I won every Jr. tournament in Australia,” she says, “that’s where I was able to break into the professional circuit.” A friend of her's managed to sneak her into a pro bracket, and she went on to win the tournament. The victory purchased her a world ranking; an aggressive serve-and-volley style kept her near the top.

The pressure to perform as a pro was exponentially higher than anything Jill had ever imagined. “Every player is great,” she says, “and there are no easy points. If I thought the pressure was intense as an amateur, then this was just incredible.” The most difficult aspect for Jill was the intense isolation that singles tennis demands at the world-class level. “No one cares about you,” she says, “It’s completely cutthroat; everyone’s out to beat you. You have to fight for your ranking all the time.” Tennis players don’t tend to socialize with one another, says Jill, since you can never let your guard down. “You can’t go out for drinks with a person at one moment, and then try to kill them on the court the next,” she points out.

Jill played in the U.S. Open for ten years straight, reaching the quarterfinals in doubles on one occasion, and she was ranked within the top 50 in the world as a singles player. It was a brutal culture, but Jill suffered no doubts: she was living her dream.

“Jill, You Made it!”

A few moments stand out. Jill played Martina Navratilova in a pick-up game of basketball with mutual friends while Jill was still at SMU. “Martina didn’t believe that I would become a pro tennis player,” recalls Jill, “but I insisted that I would. A year later, Martina looked out from the clubhouse at a tournament, saw me on the court, and screamed ‘Jill! You made it!’ It was cool that she remembered.” 

But it was the time that she played Billie Jean King that Jill remembers best. “Here I was, standing on the other side of the net from my idol,” she says, “and it was so surreal. I wanted to say, ‘I have a poster of you in my room!’” Jill defeated her in a hard-fought match. Later, she encountered Billie Jean in a much different context.

“She was truly a great woman,” Jill remembers, “I had ruined my knee once at the U.S. Open, and Billie Jean sat next to me in the training room and talked to me for three hours while I iced the injury. She didn’t have to be there – she was Billie Jean King, she could be anywhere she wanted – and yet she was talking to me. That’s when I told her, ‘You’re the reason why I’m playing tennis!’ It was special.”

To Give Back

Jill retired from the professional tennis circuit at the ripe age of 28. “I had lived my childhood dream,” she says, “and I was ready to move on.” The transition was not easy. Jill’s competitive fires continued to burn, as did the extreme intensity and focus needed for world-class play. She had cultivated social isolation and body-forgetfulness for so long that it was hard to be normal again. “I wandered around for a year, not really knowing what to do with myself,” Jill says, “I felt lost.”

She found herself in the most innocuous of places. After traveling the world as a tennis player, Jill moved to the sleepy town of Grantham, New Hampshire, where her parents lived. The community of 2,000 had few obvious advantages, but Jill fell in love with the people, and in the process, she discovered her calling.

Grantham had a F.A.S.T. squad. Or, more accurately, it wanted one, and Jill signed on. A F.A.S.T. squad is a “first aid stabilization team.” It employs EMTs certified from Basic to Paramedic who work in conjunction with the local fire department. Emergency medicine was right up Jill’s court. “I had always been interested in human anatomy,” she says, “I used to carry around anatomy texts for pleasure reading, and when I was a little girl I wanted to be a paramedic. I had been able to live my tennis dream, and now I wanted to give back to the community.”

A Positive Psychosis

Her eyes flash when Jill speaks of life as a paramedic. “For a while, I was the only person on the fast squad,” she recalls, “but over time I helped train and develop a number of other members, and now Grantham has nearly a dozen EMTs. I feel like that has been my greatest accomplishment.” The fast-paced, pressure-filled life appeals to Jill. “You’re the first one there; everything depends on you knowing exactly what to do,” she says, “You are the first person another human being sees when they are having the worst day of their life. What you do and say can make the difference between life and death.”

Perhaps the psychosis Jill jokes about in regard to her tennis training has become positively channeled into her new occupation. The pressure of split-second decisions and severe trauma doesn’t faze Jill in the least. “I like being the first one at the scene,” she says, “I like knowing exactly what to do. I like being able to calm someone who is completely terrified, especially since I often know the injured person. It is tremendously rewarding to be needed like that, and it is the thing I miss most while here at medical school. I still volunteer during Thanksgiving Break and during the summer.” 

With all its reward, emergency medicine can still be tragic. Jill doesn’t forget the blacker nights. There are suicides. There was the auto accident where Jill tried to stabilize a girl who had no face. There was also the time a family friend suffered a stroke. Unable to speak, the man looked up at Jill as she held his hand, knowing full well that it was terminal. “I asked him if he knew what had happened and what it meant,” she recalls, “and he nodded his head. There was nothing I could do.” She pauses with emotion and says softly, “That was really hard.” If such unyielding commitment and compassion is psychosis, Jill never wants to become “normal.”

UNECOM

Jill set her sights to become a D.O. almost as soon as she became a paramedic. She wanted the additional training to go into disaster and emergency medicine, and her childhood had primed her for osteopathy. “All the doctors I’d met in Pennsylvania were D.O.s,” she recalls, “I didn’t know M.D.s existed!” She finished her post-bac training at the University of Vermont, where her advisor, Beth Taylor-Nolan, was instrumental in helping her apply to UNECOM.

“I visited the school in ’98,” Jill says, “and I wanted to be here. Plus, I shadowed Dr. Bob Bishop, a UNECOM alum, and he was amazing.” Jill was thrilled to be accepted, and she arrived raring to go. But with some other major events happening in her life last year, Jill needed to take a step back. After re-working her academic plan, she’s now on track to graduate with the Class of 2010, and she appreciates every moment. “I take it one day at a time,” she says.

The amount of material is daunting, but Jill Davis has the focus and perseverance to complete medical school and contribute to the world of emergency medicine while giving back to her community. For now, it’s another form of psychosis. To cram information into your mind for hours on end until the letters and numbers form a throbbing web of knowledge and the creeping night swallows everything but the study light.

So much for normal.

-Steve Smith, RSAS