Ben Loeb was introduced to tennis at 11. The rest is history. 

He earned a marketing degree and an MBA before deciding none of that mattered as much as coaching tennis. He went back to school to earn a teaching certificate. He knew what he was doing. 

He started at the University of Missouri, coaching the women's team from 1986 to 1988. Then came 33 years of high school tennis in Missouri, first at Hickman High School, then at Rock Bridge in Columbia, that produced records no one in the state had seen before. Nineteen state championships. Forty-three Final Four appearances. A coaching record of 1,247 dual meet wins, the most in Missouri state high school history. 

He won those matches by thinking harder than everyone else. He drove on his own dime to coaching clinics. He attended sports psychology seminars. He understood better than most what tennis demands of a player, that in tennis there is no "we lost," only "I lost." He built his coaching around that truth. He developed and taught a sport psychology course at Rock Bridge from 2011 to 2019 and published four books on mental toughness and performance. 

Then he moved to Arizona and won another state championship in 2025. That makes twenty. 

He was inducted into the National High School Tennis Coaches Hall of Fame and received the MSHSAA Distinguished Service Award for 33 years of service that went well beyond winning. 

His father told him to find something he was passionate about and throw himself into it. He did. 

(2024)