“We don’t need the memories,” Mandy Reyes ’27 says. At first, this mantra might be hard for some to stomach, but to this sophomore on the Brandeis women’s tennis team, it means resisting the temptation to dwell on the past and instead finding optimism through always “reminding [herself] that it is a new day,” as Reyes explains. 

In tennis, being optimistic also means reminding herself that there is always a new point to be won. Recently, Reyes has been on a winning streak — she captured the B-singles title at the 2024 Intercollegiate Tennis Association New England Regional Championships at Bowdoin College on Sept. 22 — but she understands that it takes knowing how to lose to understand how to win. 

Reyes, who is from the Philippines, has been playing tennis for 11 years. She jokes that tennis has given her “an unhealthy desire to be the best that [she] can at everything that [she does].” Besides continuing her tennis career at Brandeis, Reyes has applied this positive attitude to academic and personal success. She shares that before she graduates she wishes to feel like she has “done something worthwhile — an achievement [or] accomplishment that would [make her] smile.” 

At Brandeis, Reyes has also contributed to the campus community as a participant in DeisHacks, which is a “48 hour social good hackathon” that supports local small businesses in Waltham by inviting teams of students to “solve relevant non-profit challenges.”  As a first year, Reyes and her team won the 2024 Hackathon, and she cites this as her proudest accomplishment at Brandeis so far. Pointing to the 48 hours she spent working towards “making her project and pitch better,” Reyes says she will remember this accomplishment forever. “The stress was worthwhile,” Reyes states, continuing her theme of embracing the difficult road to success. 

Reyes explains that she has tennis to thank for her grit. “Tennis taught me how to lose,” she admits. She reflects that the Swiss tennis legend, Roger Federer, “only won around 54% of the points he played and still won over 80% of his matches.” To Reyes, this shows that winning is not about having a perfect game statistically — instead winning comes down to fighting until the very end. 

Reyes says that “to be beaten in a point, have a twenty-second break to reset and forget about it, and continue to play the next,” reflects the fact that tennis “is a brutal sport that forces a person to look past their earlier shortcomings and try for a better future.” For Reyes, a better future refers to not only the next minute of the game, the next set and the next match, but looking ahead as far into her career as she can imagine.

Reyes is primed for a tennis career at Brandeis powered by impressive ambition and determination — and she recognizes the power of a team atmosphere in driving her forward as well. She says that “growing up playing an individual sport, [she] didn't know how it felt to be a part of a team. Up until university tennis, [she] didn't realize how reassuring it would be to have an entire team holding [her] up.” Reyes says that in her mind, “a team is built from bonds formed through countless ups and downs.” Through both winning and losing, “they [her teammates] are the people that [she] can turn to and rely on.”

Reyes and her fellow Judges will compete this coming weekend at the Bowdoin Invitational on Oct. 5. One can only expect that Reyes is looking forward to another “war,” as she puts it. Reyes says that she likes to clear her mind before competing, and she “tend[s] to read before competing.”  Clear mind, optimistic attitude, always looking forward — Mandy Reyes trusts her process. She gives one last ode to tennis as a guiding principle of her perspective on life: “although I began with saying it teaches you how to lose, in reality, tennis teaches you how to win.”