As a varsity tennis player and engineering student, Abdelnour succeeds on and off the court

Bruno Abdelnour has never really been one to just get by. Not only does the junior play tennis for the varsity team, he also is in the College of Engineering, a rare feat for Illini athletes. And in his final two years at the University, he wants to make the most of his time on and off the tennis court.

After three semesters in the Division of General Studies, the Syria native became one of the few students to transfer into engineering, a goal of his since arriving at the University. He will officially be in mechanical engineering in October.

“I just really like learning,” Abdelnour said. “It’s weird, but I like learning about the world, and I like doing it by doing math and physics and chemistry. I feel like in engineering you do all these things.”

“It fits him very well from what I’ve talked to him,” teammate Roy Kalmanovich said. “He’s very interested in that particular field of study, he’s very motivated to study it, so that’s clearly a good decision for him. He’s very intelligent and he’s very proficient in that area so it only makes sense.”

Though Abdelnour already understood English when he first arrived to campus, speaking it was a different challenge. All it took, though, was time before any problems on and off the court started to go away. The coaches were able to give him better instruction and his grades improved—though they were never very bad in the first place.

He recalls during his freshman year taking a chemistry class with about 300 students. After the first exam he said he was getting a B-plus, a solid grade but not up to his usual standards. As the semester went on, he was consistently scoring A’s and A-pluses. At semester’s end his teacher contacted him to let him know he would receive an A-plus for the semester, the only student in the class to do so.

“It made me realize I was right about focusing on school and not just on tennis because I realized I could do something good with that, too,” Abdelnour said.

Once a rather shy member of the team, Abdelnour was beginning to open up and start making jokes.

“He’s really broken out of his shell quite a bit,” former teammate Marek Czerwinski said. “At the beginning he was a lot more timid because he didn’t have the communication abilities that now he has, so he’s gotten a ton better with it. He’s just felt a lot more confident, I think, about himself. You can tell in the way he carries himself and in the fact that he just jokes around with us.”

In the classroom, Abdelnour continued his strong performance. He helped the men’s tennis team earn a 3.34 cumulative grade point average, the highest of the Illini men’s athletic teams. His 4.0 GPA in the spring semester helped him earn the Outstanding Scholar-Athlete Award among male sophomore athletes. Through his first year and a half on campus he has a 3.96 grade point average, with A-pluses in the chemistry class, two calculus classes and one physics class.

It’s in large part because of his work ethic that coaches and players respect him so much. In fact, it’s almost taken on a reputation of its own.

“(His work ethic) has pretty much, in a sense, become a little bit of a joke on the team because of how hard he actually does work, he almost does it excessively, which is a great thing actually,” said Czerwinski, who still practices with the team. “He’s actually helped motivate the team because of his work ethic.

“You just look at how fit he is, on the court how hard he works in practice and everything like that, and even more than that is just how much he is working off the court with his schoolwork. It just becomes a joke because he’s taking ice baths and studying during them.”

In the fall just two short years ago, Abdelnour was trying to decide where he wanted to attend college. He had spent the last three years as a member of the Tennis Club of Hauts de Nimes in France after growing up in Aleppo, Syria.

Abdelnour’s family hired a college placement service to help him find a college. He said his first choice was Illinois, followed by Texas A&M and Rice. Though a strong tennis program was important to him, a prestigious engineering program was just as important to his decision.

Insert head coach Brad Dancer. Based on a recommendation, Dancer began speaking with Abdelnour to get him to commit to Illinois as soon as possible, only knowing about Abdelnour’s competitiveness and ability to play solid on the baseline.

“We took a chance on a friend of mine who vouched for Bruno, his character and his charisma,” Dancer said. “We had never seen him play before.”

At times, the hard work takes its toll. He admits he probably doesn’t sleep as much as he should and that a typical day consists of classes, playing tennis, training and studying.

But Abdelnour hopes his hard work ethic will lift him to new heights. He‘s already well on his way to an engineering degree, but still feels he has something to accomplish on the tennis court. Most notably, he wants to become an All-American, a feat accomplished by Nevolo this past season.

Ultimately, the biggest honor for him would be recognition as someone who set an example and standard for current and future Illini tennis players.

“I would like to be someone who helped the program, who people would talk about like, ‘Yeah, we had that guy — he was an engineer, he worked so hard, he had great work ethic, he helped out his teammates,’” Abdelnour said. “To make my story stay with the program and help out the team would be great.”
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Writer: Gregory Zeck, Engineering Communications Office.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.