She was the girl who just wanted to prove herself — prove that she could beat her brother, prove that great tennis players do come from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

At first, Micki Schillig didn’t especially care for tennis. In her view, she didn’t have the natural talent her brother possessed. But she was driven, and she had the physical gifts and family support that enabled her to climb to the highest stages in her sport — major international tournaments including the U.S. Open and Wimbledon.

Thirty years later, from her place in the small pantheon of Cedar Rapids natives who have made it to the professional level in their respective sports, she looks back with a mixture of gratitude and regret. And when she cheers for her 8-year-old son at his baseball games, she sometimes wants to warn the over-ambitious parents surrounding her to be careful what they wish for.

“Just being average is sometimes better,” she says with a knowing smile.

But Schillig was never average. That was evident soon after she started playing tennis with her brother, Mike, and father, Chuck. Her dad was a self-taught tennis player who took up the game in hopes of finding a life sport to replace high school athletics — someplace he could spend the restless energy that kept him awake at night.

He liked it so much he built the Westfield Tennis Club in southwest Cedar Rapids in 1976, then worked there 18 hours a day while he continued his job as a  mechanic until the tennis business took off.

“He started playing with us when I was about nine,” Micki recalls. “My brother was pretty good and I kept playing because I didn’t want him to be better than me. It wasn’t because I loved the sport.”

Playing once or twice a week, the Schillig kids began entering local youth tournaments. Micki won her first championship — the Ottumwa Open — at age 12.

“I was hooked by that plastic trophy,” she says. After that, those little awards kept her going at a time when girls tennis barely existed in Iowa and her high school, LaSalle, had no team.

That proved to be a blessing, Micki says in retrospect. “The level of girls tennis was so low in Iowa at the time, and I could play at Westfield with men and better players, so for me it worked out great.”

Playing unattached, she powered her way through the Iowa girls sectional and district tournaments to capture the state championship in 1976, 1978 and 1979 — the first girl from Cedar Rapids to do so. In 1977, she missed the state tournament while she played a 17-and-under invitational tournament in California.

Schillig wasn’t a year-round tennis player, she says — noting how much more intensely kids prepare and play sports today — but spent the summers honing her skills at regional and national tournaments. A highlight was playing a junior doubles tournament in Taiwan with a partner she met in St. Louis.

She also remembers playing in her second national tournament. “When I got there I was standing there looking at the draw with the other players, and I heard this girl say, ‘If I win that round, I play some girl from Iowa.’ She was totally making fun of it, as if no good tennis players could come from Iowa. I ended up beating her, and that got me some attention.”

In spite of her accomplishments, college was a question mark for Schillig. “I never liked school and I didn’t want to go to college,” she says, even though she had received several scholarship offers. “My mom and dad said, ‘Just go and play tennis.’”

She accepted a full-ride from San Diego State and set off for the west — the first of many harrowing solo endeavors. “I was horrible, horrible homesick,” she says. “I had worn uniforms for 12 years, and they were wearing dolphin shorts.” Her parents took turns visiting her throughout the first semester to keep her from turning tail for Iowa.

Schillig majored in P.E. and got all A's, but didn’t like the pressure. “I knew I was never going to teach.” But she loved her coach, Carol Plunkett, loved working on her tennis for hours at a time, and made an immediate impact for the Aztecs.

“I knew I could make the team,” she says, “but I never expected to play No.1 for four years. I improved a lot and I loved playing people I didn’t know.”

She became a three-time All-American with a 105-36 record. In her junior year she reached the pinnacle of her college career when she made it to the finals of the first-ever NCAA Women’s National Tennis Championship after upsetting a handful of players considered “untouchable.”

She lost the title match to a player from arch-rival Stanford whom she had beaten five times. “It was very windy and high-altitude, and I didn’t serve well,” she recalls. “I won more points than she did but lost the match. That was the only time I cared about statistics. But just getting there for my coach — who was building this team from players that Stanford didn’t want — meant a lot to me.”

It wasn’t lost on her that the woman who beat her was turning pro after the tournament, she says. “That was the first time I ever thought that maybe I could do that for a living.”

Her senior season, playing under the weight of huge expectations, was not much fun, she says, but her performance in the NCAAs had qualified her for the main draw at Wimbledon, launching her — ready or not — for her three-year ride on the professional circuit. It was unknown territory for the young Iowan and her family.

Schillig flew off to London with no coach and without even knowing where she would stay. On the plane, she met another player, Sheila McInerney (now in her 29th year as head coach at Arizona State University), who took Schillig under her wing as she entered the rarified air of the All England Tennis Club.

“My first Wimbledon, I thought, ‘Here I am. I can’t believe it.’ An official car picks you up and drops you off at the royal stairs, and there are all these photographers snapping pictures. I’ll never forget that. I wanted to tell them, ‘You’re wasting your film on me.’”

Although she never advanced beyond the round of 64, Schillig continued to play at a high-enough level to compete in three Wimbledons and four U.S. Opens, along with countless other tournaments around the world. The high point of her professional career came at the 1982 U.S. Open when she upset a top-20 ranked player.

“I barely made enough to pay for hotels and travel,” she laughs, “and my parents scraped to make it possible the whole time. It’s not the glamorous life people think it is for anyone but the top players.”

Still, she says, she had the opportunity to play some of the best players of her era, including Tracy Austin, Gabriela Sabatini and Pam Shriver. “So many good things came from it. I was traveling the world. I was a homebody, and I learned to fend for myself. I learned a lot of life lessons.”

She also received an unsolicited job offer to become the head women’s tennis coach at the University of Iowa, where she went on to become the winningest tennis coach in the program’s history over the next eight years. In 1990 she was named Big Ten Coach of the Year after her team went 17-6 overall and 8-3 in the Big Ten.

But it was not a satisfying situation. “I hated it,” she says bluntly. “I love to play. I don’t like teaching. I wanted to do it for them. But it was a competitive thing, a challenge,” and she enjoyed the perks — including summers free and annual trips to play her alma mater in San Diego. She was also eminently qualified to help her players deal with homesickness, she adds.

But she wanted to try living a more normal life like everyone else, she says. “Finally, I said to my Dad, ‘Either you’re going to give me a job at Westfield or I’ll do something else.’” He welcomed her back.

That summer, she got a massage from a sports therapist and realized that giving massages was something she might like to do for a living. She proceeded to get her massage therapy license, and — in spite of his doubts about her latest move — her dad converted a room at the tennis club to a massage studio.

At long last, Schillig left behind the pressure and the competition and found the work that made her happy. “I have done massage for 17 years, and I love it,” she says. “No one’s ever mad at you. I feel like I help people, and I’ve met so many neat people who don’t know me because of tennis.”

Ten years ago, she met Dennis Feldman on a blind date. They were married the next year and had a son, Mac, the year after.

Schillig was inducted into the San Diego State Athletic Hall of Fame in 1995. Last December she received the same recognition at the USTA Missouri Valley Hall of Fame. “It’s an honor to be selected,” she says, “but it’s always a surprise to me. It’s just what I did.”

Schillig played in a mixed doubles tournament the year before Mac was born, but was so nervous she could barely get a serve in, she says. That was her last competition, although she enjoys keeping in shape and playing casual tennis at Westfield.

“I’m still around tennis people so I can get the tennis fix, the tennis talk, but I never watch it on TV.”

Instead, she focuses on the good memories — like her final tournament, played in Greece, with her dad there watching. “It was special,” she remembers, with a hint of emotion.

“I didn’t really like playing on the pro circuit and I didn’t like coaching,” says the woman who was highly successful at both. “But I realized at age 30 that I had done more in 30 years than most people do in a lifetime, and I’m grateful for that.”