We recorded this one in Queensland, with Jay Harrison sitting across from us, a long way from where his story started.
Jay grew up in New Plymouth, New Zealand, where he was a three-time high school champion. His first coach was Amrit Rai’s father, so the idea of U.S. college tennis was not a distant rumour. It was on court with him from the beginning.
Today, Jay is part of the team at Platform Sports. He spends his time helping other athletes do what he did: leave home, back themselves, and turn a New Zealand or Australian junior career into a U.S. college opportunity.
This conversation is not a highlight reel. It is about the reality behind the photos. The pressure, the doubt, the networks that keep you standing, and why Jay still tells shy, home-loving athletes to go.
Jay was one of the rare athletes who knew about the college pathway early. With Amrit’s dad as his first coach, college tennis was part of the language around training and competition.
By the time he reached high school, he already knew that college in the United States was the direction he wanted.
That meant he understood the basics. He knew academics mattered. He knew he would need to keep improving his tennis. He knew coaches would be looking. Even then, he is honest about the limitations.
New Zealand and Australian tennis are built on their own ranking systems. UTR exists alongside those systems, not inside them. That makes it harder for juniors here to stack enough UTR-relevant matches, even when they know the rules of the game.
“I got my UTR up,” he explained, “but it was never quite where I wanted it to be.” At his peak he sat in the high tens. Good enough to open Division I conversations, but not the sort of number that sells itself.
Looking back, he is clear. Every Kiwi and Australian junior who even thinks they might want college tennis should be playing as many UTR events as they can. ITF results help, but coaches recruit off UTR. The sooner you understand that, the more options you will have.
Even with an inside view of the system, Jay is blunt. On his own, he would have stood “no shot”.
“It was not just about knowing what college tennis is,” he said. “It was how to get in front of coaches, who to speak to, when to speak to them, and how to present myself.”
He talked to Division II and NAIA programmes. He was open to different levels. Seattle University was one of only a small handful of Division I schools that came into the mix, and it was not a trophy choice. It simply fit.
He is very clear that having Platform in his corner was not a nice-to-have. It was the difference between hoping a coach might notice him and actually being on their radar, prepared for calls, and ready to speak about his game and his goals.
Jay did not choose Seattle just because of tennis. In fact, the way he describes it shows exactly how you want families thinking about “fit”.
He wanted the West Coast. He wanted nature, greenery, water, and somewhere that felt a little bit like home. Friends who had lived or travelled there told him that Seattle was about as close to New Zealand as he would find in the United States.
Location mattered for another reason. He did not want four connecting flights between home and campus, especially in the shadow of Covid. Seattle offered a realistic path home if he ever needed it.
Academically, he knew he wanted business. Seattle University had a respected business school, small class sizes, and professors he ended up knowing by name. Sitting in a city where Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing shape the skyline did not hurt either.
“It had a lot going for it,” he said. “The city, the programme, the diversity on the team. It felt like a place I could grow, not somewhere I had already peaked.”
On paper, college is a neat step from one system to another. In reality, it can feel like a shock to the system.
Jay had grown up training in blocks of 60 to 90 minutes. In Seattle, three hours on court was normal. Then there was the expectation to be vocal.
In New Zealand, he had always been the “head down, get on with it” type. Quiet. Focused. Not especially loud.
Division I tennis did not leave much room for that.
From the first sessions, the message was simple. Be loud. Be engaged. Be part of the team. Matches were no longer just about your own scoreboard. They were about the programme.
That shift, he says, stretched him in good ways. It forced him to grow as a person, not just as a player. It also revealed pressures he had never really felt before.
The run in to college was not smooth. Jay had wrist surgery the year before he left. He spent significant time off court. His match play was not where he wanted it.
Arriving in a major U.S. city, facing an entirely new standard of training, and carrying the expectation to perform for a team amplified that.
He talks very openly about performance anxiety. Having a coach watching every session and every point. Wanting to deliver for the team. Not wanting to be the one who let anyone down.
For a long stretch, he did not feel like himself in singles. He leaned on doubles, which he enjoyed, but in his own words he felt like “a shell” of the player he had been.
The pressure was not just internal. American sport culture is intense. The stakes always feel high. For a New Zealand athlete who was more reserved by nature, that took time to adjust to.
Looking back, he is grateful for how much it shaped him. At the time, it was hard.
At several points in the conversation, it would have been easy to imagine a different ending. Transfer to a different school. Drop to another division. Give up tennis and move home.
None of those things happened.
Instead, Jay stayed at Seattle and chose to work through it. Not because the tennis was perfect, but because everything else around him was right.
The city felt like home. The business programme was exactly what he wanted. He had a partner he loved and a group of teammates that became family. He was clear-eyed enough to recognise that there are seasons in an athlete’s life where the sport is not the whole picture.
He is honest that another athlete in his position might have chosen differently. For him, staying made sense because he could see that tennis was opening doors, not defining his entire future.
That is the advice he gives now. You should always ask yourself a simple question: if the sport disappeared tomorrow, would I still want to be at this school.
If you want to see what Jay values most from his time in Seattle, ask him about his teammates.
He arrived in a recruiting class of five, which is huge for a tennis squad of nine. Most of them graduated together, joined along the way by two more players who became part of their year group.
Those seven players, spread across the world now, are the ones Jay calls “nine brothers for life”. They are the people who can offer a couch or a spare bed with one message.
The team was also incredibly international. Almost every year, there was only one or two Americans on the roster. That meant players from different cultures and backgrounds, but all with similar sporting experiences, living and training together around the same shared goal.
Outside tennis, the network widened again. Athlete-only dorm floors in first year. Friendships with other sports. Professors who took time to know their students. Parents and family a long flight away, but a very real support system on the ground.
That is the part of college sport many people never see. Your network is not a line on a CV. It is a safety net when things are hard and a springboard when you graduate.
When Jay talks about his favourite memories, very few of them are just about a forehand or a scoreline.
Senior year felt special because the team knew it would be the final season of men’s tennis at Seattle. They were told before the year began that the programme would be cut after that season, which meant every match had an extra weight to it.
There were big wins over conference rivals. There were long, emotional days where the reality of “this is the last time” started to sink in.
Then there were all the other moments. The road trips. Twenty-match seasons with no home fixtures. Team meals at chain restaurants that somehow become sacred rituals. Flying to Texas, California, Arizona, and building shared stories that last longer than any ranking.
Off court, Jay remembers those Washington Huskies football games. Stepping into an 80,000-seat stadium ten minutes up the road from his own mid-sized campus. Watching an entire city pour its energy into a college programme.
He remembers hikes and lakes, drives across the Canadian border to Vancouver, weekend trips to California with his partner, and standing at graduation in a packed arena under the Space Needle with the people who had walked with him for four years.
These are the things that are hardest to explain to athletes and parents sitting in New Zealand or Australia, wondering if the risk is worth it. You do not just get a sport. You get a life you could not have built if you stayed still.
When we asked Jay to narrow it down to one point of advice, he gave two.
The first is practical. Start early. Not because he works for Platform, but because the system is complex and the rules are strict. There is academic eligibility to protect. There are tournaments and UTR decisions to plan. There are small mistakes that can cost entire windows of opportunity.
“The moment you decide you want college,” he says, “is the moment you should start talking to people and building a plan.”
The second is about mindset. If you are sitting on the fence about college in the United States, really consider going.
Jay describes himself as the shy one, the kid who did not like leaving home. For most of his friends, the idea that he would be the one to move across the world was a shock. Yet he did it, and he will tell you now that he would not take it back.
“You will grow so much as a person,” he said. “You will never look back in the same way.”
You cannot play your sport forever. You can, however, build a pathway that gives you an education, a network, and a set of experiences that stay with you long after the last match point.
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