Blair Shankle - Women's Tennis Coach - Rice University Athletics

Blair Shankle

Title:
Associate Head Coach

Blair Shankle completed her first season with Rice in 2024-25, where she helped guide the Owls through one of the best seasons in recent history. Rice finished with a 17-7 record, which included a stretch where the Owls won 11 of its last 12 matches in the regular season. She helped lead Rice to six ranked victories in the stretch, including a top-50 win over Wichita State. Shankle's leadership helped bring Rice back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2021.

Shankle joined the Owls in June 2024 after spending the previous two seasons at SMU, first as an assistant coach and as an associate head coach in her second season. Shankle helped the Mustangs to back-to-back AAC championships and appearances in the NCAA Championships, with the team defeating Alabama this past season for the program’s first NCAA tournament victory since 2011. Shankle was named the ITA Texas Region Assistant Coach of the Year this season after helping graduate senior Taylor Johnson earn AAC Player of the Year honors.

Prior to SMU, Shankle spent two years at Utah, where she helped lead the Utes in 2021-22 to a program-best 9-0 start, their first Pac 12 Conference Tournament win since 2017 and Utah's first win against USC in program history. Shankle was an integral part in building Utah’s ninth-ranked recruiting class in 2022, the program’s first-ever top-10 recruiting class, and was named the ITA Mountain Region Assistant Coach of the Year that same season.

Shankle began her coaching career as an assistant coach at Ole Miss for two years beginning in 2019, helping guide several players to numerous regional awards including the ITA Southern Region's Most Improved Senior and Player to Watch. Shankle also helped players reach both the singles finals and the doubles semifinals of the ITA Southern Regionals during her time in Oxford.

As a player at Baylor, Shankle was a three-time All-American for the Bears and finished her career ranked third all-time in doubles wins (99), tied for fourth in singles winning percentage (.826), sixth in singles wins (109) and seventh in doubles winning percentage (.733). She was named the ITA Most Improved Senior both regionally and nationally. Off the court, Shankle was a four-time ITA Scholar-Athlete, three-time Academic All-Big 12 First Team selection and eight-time Big 12 Commissioner's Honor Roll selection. In 2017, Shankle was a CoSIDA/CSC Academic All-District First Team honoree. She was the first person in program history to be named both an All-American on the court and in the classroom