Mizzou Athletics introduces new tennis coach

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

Mizzou tennis officially has its new leader.

On Thursday, members of Mizzou Athletics took time to introduce Robin Goodman as the program's 13th head coach. The Cambridge, England native is coming to Columbia after having spent one year as the associate head coach at Tennessee, where he helped the Volunteers to a No. 19 national ranking.

In his opening remarks, Goodman said what stood out about Mizzou was the tremendous of amount of passion that he saw people had for the University.

"When I was first took the position here, you could not believe how many people reached out to me like coaches, alumni, donors, just all sorts of different people shot me texts. I had phone calls and not only did it make me feel incredibly welcome here, it really showed me that there's no place like this when it comes to passion and the amount of pure appreciation for this program and for this university is second to none," Goodman said.

The former Tennessee associate head coach will look to turn around a program that went winless in Southeastern Conference action in the 2026 campaign. However, he's no stranger to building up programs. In fact, he did the same thing in his last head coaching job at Pacific.

When he took the reins of the Pacific Tigers, it was a program looking for answers...and they found them under the leadership of Coach Goodman. He elevated the program up to national prominence, earning West Coast Coast Conference Coach of the Year honors in 2023 and helping them climb as high as No. 49 in the national rankings.

"I did have the opportunity to turn that program around and now I have an opportunity to do it again," Goodman said. "I would actually do a lot of things different, you know, and I think that could speed up the process. I learned so much over those five years at Pacific, but the most rewarding thing is instilling confidence in the student athletes and getting them to believe in themselves and what they can do. When that time comes and they graduate, they're going to remember their experience and in a really positive way."

You can watch the full interview with Goodman in the video player below.

Athletic Director Laird Veatch said that Goodman's experience turning around a program at Pacific, as well as being a part of a rebuild as a player at Drake, was important in the process of finding a new head coach. He said you have to find someone that is wired for that kind of challenge and they believe that Goodman is.

As far as what will show Veatch that the program is trending in the right direction again, it's - obviously - success on the court, but that's something that takes patience.

"We have to recognize that that's not going to happen overnight, right? When you have a program that's in that spot in the most competitive league in the country, you know, he's going to have to take steps. I think because of his recruiting network and how he knows the business works, I think he'll make some pretty fast steps," Veatch said. "But, he's got the opportunity to really build it and build it the right way and as you're assessing coaches, a lot of that is also behind the scenes things that you see they're doing, how they're interacting with student athletes, how they're developing them, what they're doing in the community and building those relationships. There's a lot of things that go into building a program."

You can watch the full interview with Veatch in the video player below.

When the Tigers take the court for the 2026-27 season, he wants fans to see that his group of ladies have an incredible amount of fight.

He emphasized, when it comes to a turnaround, it's all about the little things.

"We've got to control all of the little one percents and we've got to be creative and we've got to do everything we can, every day, to be consistent. The SEC is a is is a tough league and so if we want to compete in that league, we've got to we got to be all that everyone's going to be all in," Goodman said. "I'm just excited to run with it."

Of course, one of the major keys to success will be support from the University. When the ABC 17 sports team caught up with Veatch at an event in Springfield on Tuesday night, he said there were some steps he wanted to take with the tennis program, including getting the outdoor courts up to speed.

He talked more about how he goes about identifying Goodman and program's biggest needs, at Thursday's press conference.

"Those courts are certainly right there at the top of the list," he said. "For coaches these days, it is also NIL support for recruiting. Some of those things are fairly obvious, but he needs some time to be able to come in and assess that himself and come to us and tell us, right. You know, we really work hard at trying to empower our coaches to lead their programs and they're the experts. They need to be able to come to us and how do we provide, you know, resources and support to help get the job done."