Schneider ready for Breakers success

Kerry Schneider has been working hard the last five months as the new general manager of World Team Tennis' Orange County Breakers.

Schneider, 34, has been working for World Team Tennis for more than eight years, and she still is the director of marketing and sponsorship services for the pro league. But for those last five months she has also embraced her new challenge.

The O.C. Breakers, formerly the Newport Beach Breakers, debut at 7 p.m. Monday night against defending WTT champion Washington. Celebrating their 10th season, the Breakers also have a new venue as they're playing this year at the Bren Events Center on the UC Irvine campus.

Tickets start at $15. The Breakers, who will have marquee player Lindsay Davenport in every home match and are again coached by Trevor Kronemann, have seven home matches through July 28. The rest of the all-new roster includes Travis Parrott, John-Patrick Smith, Anna-Lena Groenefeld and substitute Jana Juricova.

Schneider, who moved to the West Coast from Maryland to take on GM responsibilities, now lives in Irvine. She took time Friday to answer a few questions prior to the start of the season.

Question: How did you become general manager of the Breakers? What was the process like?

Answer: World Team Tennis owns this team, and has always owned this team. The Hoag Hospital Foundation had been managing it for the last five years. This year, by mutual parting of ways, World Team Tennis took back over management of the team. We did have someone local who had been put in place to run the team, but we just, for lots of different reasons, decided that maybe wasn't the best thing in the middle of January.

I was going to be helping in a consulting role, and coming out here about a week a month leading into the season. Because I had already started in that process, and because I had always expressed to [WTT co-founder] Billie Jean [King] and [WTT CEO and Commissioner] Ilana [Kloss] that I would love to have the opportunity to try to work at a team level, they gave me this opportunity to come out and do it on a full-time basis.

Everything happened really fast. We made the decision Martin Luther King weekend ... and then I moved out here about two weeks later. So, the end of January. I had been working from a remote World Team Tennis office in Delaware for the last four years. Prior to that, I had been based and living in New York.

Q: What was that transition like for you?