At one point or another, every player in the field at the Boyd Tinsley USTA Women’s Pro Tennis Championships made a life-changing decision. Essentially, Kimberly Couts made her career choice at the ripe age of 7.

“The head coach at Cal…it was a bunch of [bleep],” Alexandra Podkolzina said. “I’m not going to go into it, but it’s the best school. It’s the No. 1 public school in the country.”

A decade ago, the knee injury that all athletes dreaded was the torn anterior cruciate ligament. Today, it’s been replaced by a scarier one — an injury that requires microfracture surgery.

She first came to Charlottesville as a fragile teenager forced to grow up by seeking her fortune as a budding international tennis player. At 14, Varvara Lepchenko and her father came to the U.S. to seek political asylum and to make a living playing tennis. They left behind their country, war-strifed Uzbekistan, which was plagued by civil conflict. They also left behind Lepchenko’s mother.