Laetitia Rizk arrived at Stetson University in the autumn of 2021 as Lebanon's No. 1 ranked U18 player, a four-time Fed Cup representative, and an athlete who had spent two years rebuilding her career after a serious personal low point at thirteen. She left two years later and transferred to Babson College, one of the world's top entrepreneurship schools, where she continued competing at varsity level while building the professional foundation she had always intended the college pathway to provide.
There is a line on Laetitia Rizk's personal website that says more about her than any ranking or match result could.
"I always saw tennis as a perfect metaphor for life."
She started taking the sport seriously at nine years old in Beirut. At eleven she was selected to represent Lebanon in the West Asia tournament. At thirteen, by her own account, she hit what she describes as a low point in her career and her life. She lost almost everything. She spent nearly two years in what she describes as a period of self-destruction, before finding her way back through the thing that had always given her structure: the game itself.
After fighting her way back, after a winter of long and tough practices and a rebuilt competitive record, she participated in over four Fed Cup events and competed internationally across Sri Lanka, Thailand, Croatia, Turkey, and France. She became Lebanon's No. 1 ranked U18 player, captained the U16 Fed Cup team, and reached a peak UTR of 8.03. The pathway from that low point at thirteen to a Division I scholarship at Stetson University at seventeen is not a straightforward story of talent and development. It is a story about what resilience actually looks like when it is tested by something real.
Laetitia attended College Louise Wegman in Beirut, where she developed her game while also navigating the particular demands of being a serious tennis player in a country with limited infrastructure for the sport and significant instability in the years leading up to her departure.
Her competitive record before Stetson was built across two distinct phases. The first was the period of early international exposure, representing Lebanon in U14 and U16 Fed Cup competition, competing at regional and continental level, and beginning to accumulate the international match experience that gives college coaches something concrete to assess. The second was the comeback, after 2016-2017, when she rebuilt her ranking and her game with the kind of deliberate, patient effort that tends to produce athletes with a different quality of mental resilience than those who have never been seriously tested.
By the time she was having conversations with Stetson's coaching staff, she was Lebanon's No. 1 senior player, had captained the national U16 Fed Cup team in Sri Lanka in 2019, and was arriving with an ITF competitive record that reflected genuine international experience. She was not a promising player from a small country with limited exposure. She was an experienced competitor who had spent several years representing Lebanon on courts across multiple continents.
Laetitia arrived at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, in the autumn of 2021 and joined a programme that was performing at a high level. The Stetson women's team won the ASUN Conference championship in 2021 and reached the conference final in 2022, meaning Laetitia arrived as part of a genuinely successful squad rather than a developing one.
Her freshman season in 2021-22 was limited in playing time, as is common for international freshmen finding their feet in a new competitive environment, but she won both matches she competed in and was named to the ASUN Academic Honor Roll, establishing her academic standard from the outset. She went 1-0 in singles with a victory at flight five against Florida National and 1-0 in doubles paired with Laia Pasini at flight three against Atlantis University.
What the match record does not show is what she was building in the classroom and beyond the court. She tutored Foundation Economics courses and Intermediate Micro and Macroeconomics during her time in DeLand, a practical application of her academic work that also reflected the professional direction she had already identified.
After two years at Stetson, Laetitia transferred to Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Babson is consistently ranked the world's number one institution for entrepreneurship education, a business-focused college whose graduates have built some of the most significant companies and organisations across multiple industries globally. It is not a tennis decision. It is an education decision, made by an athlete who understood from the beginning that the college pathway was not only about sport.
At Babson she joined the varsity tennis team, the Economics Club, the Consulting Club, the National Society of Leadership and Success, and participated in a Management Consulting Field Experience programme, applying her academic learning to real-world consulting projects. She also worked as a Summer Associate at Strategy& Middle East, one of the world's leading management consulting firms, in Lebanon, during her time at Babson.
That combination, Babson degree, consulting experience, international competitive tennis, and a professional network being built in parallel, reflects an athlete who arrived in the American college system with a clear and serious picture of what she wanted from it beyond the sport.
Laetitia's pathway is one of the most instructive in this series for families who are thinking about the college system from an academic and professional perspective rather than an exclusively athletic one.
The question she was always answering through her choices was not simply where she could play the best tennis. It was where she could build the most complete foundation for the professional life she intended to have. Stetson gave her a Division I environment, ASUN conference experience, and the academic stability to tutor economics while competing. Babson gave her something even more specific: one of the world's most respected brands in entrepreneurship and business education, a professional network built for what comes after graduation, and a consulting experience that most students anywhere do not access until well into their working careers.
The tennis was always part of the plan. So was everything else.
If you are a student-athlete or parent trying to understand the U.S. college pathway, start with a conversation. Platform Sports can help you understand your options, your timeline, and what the right fit could look like.
