As the number one junior player in all of China, Fangran Tian has said she always had her sights set on playing college tennis at her dream school in Southern California – for the UCLA Bruins and Head Coach Stella Sampras Webster.

The Beijing-born Tian recently completed a fairytale-ending to her freshman year going undefeated and finishing as the No. 1 player in the country thanks to winning six matches in six days without dropping a set and capturing the NCAA Division I Singles National Championship in Orlando, Florida.

“It was the best year I could ever expect,” said Tian, who quickly transitioned into the pro game days later entering the first of seven SoCal Pro Series events at the Rancho Santa Fe Tennis Club and making the singles final before falling to Oceanside’s Megan McCray. 

Just like in Orlando, Tian didn’t drop a set in Rancho Santa Fe until falling to McCray, 6-1, 0-6, 6-4, in last Sunday’s final and entered the match on an overall 10-match winning streak and taking 20 straight sets without a loss. 

“I kind of knew I had won 20 sets in a row, but I didn’t want to think about it,” Tian admitted. “I just wanted to play each match without thinking about the past.”

How dominant was Tian’s college inaugural season? Just ask fellow freshman Madison Sieg from USC. Sieg basically beat everyone she faced during her first season rolling to 32 wins against no defeats – that is against players not named Fangran Tian. That’s right. The only three losses of Sieg’s season came against her crosstown rival Tian.

Tian truly came out of nowhere to shock the college tennis world. A recent UCLA Daily Bruin headline said it all: “From Unknown to National Champion: Chronicling Fangran Tian’s Meteoric Rise”

The NCAA singles championship represents the first in the career for Sampras Webster, who was on staff as an assistant coach under Bill Zaima when Keri Phebus won the Bruins’ first NCAA singles title in the mid-1990s. 

Tian, 19, is the oldest of two children with a younger brother who doesn’t play tennis competitively. In fact, Tian’s parents are also not tennis players and she said she learned the game thanks to a PE teacher at the school she attended that had a tennis club connected to it. 

“At the beginning it was just for fun, but around 12 or 13 I got more serious,” Tian said. “I played a lot of ITF juniors in Asia and got into the junior Australian and French Opens.”

Tian, who has already won a $15,000 ITF Pro Futures event in Champaign, Illinois, said it was an agency she was working with that helped her connect to her No. 1 choice of colleges.

“From the first moment I saw [UCLA] I just fell in love with the campus and the coaches,” said Tian, who entered the pre-qualifying at the All-American in the fall and preceded to reel off five straight wins.

That was all Sampras Webster and her assistant Rance Brown had to see before deciding to insert Tian into the No. 1 spot in the singles lineup for the start of the dual match season in January. Pretty heady stuff for an international teenager in her first year of college.

“Coach put me at No. 1 right from the start of the season, which is crazy to think about looking back now,” Tian said. “I just want to say thanks for the coaches who trusted in me.”

While Tian became the first woman’s player from a SoCal school to win the NCAAs as a freshman, there have been two men’s players who have accomplished the feat. Where things get interesting is that both Jimmy Connors (UCLA, 1971) and Cecil Mamiit (USC, 1996) both turned pro after their victories deciding not to return for their sophomore season.

“I definitely have thought about going professional,” Tian said. “But I will most likely go back at least for one more year.”

Tian is entered into this week’s SoCal Pro Series event on the campus of USD and hopes to play three or four more events before finally heading home to her family in China for the first time since last September.

“I really miss them a lot,” she said. “I’m literally counting down the days [28 days at the time of this interview] until I can see them again.”