Julie Thu

Meet new member Francesca La’O!  While new to NWTO, Francesca has been a life-long tennis player with a wealth of experience playing tennis in venues around the world.  Francesca was born and raised in Manila, Philippines and lived there until she was 19.  Her dad played tennis, and as a child she would watch him play at their sports club during the summer.  She started hitting against the wall with a pelota racket because she thought it looked fun, and shortly after her mom got her started with lessons.  At her local club, the majority of the courts were what they called shell, made out of crushed seashells:  think slower than clay but with tons of bad bounces!  And they were mostly indoors, so also extremely humid. 

Growing up in the Philippines, many were not fortunate enough to get access to play tennis, and this affected the level of competition Francesca had locally.  She was lucky to have the means to travel around Asia and the world to get more competition as a junior.  Her first international competition was in Malaysia when she was 13.  By the time she was done with juniors, she had participated in 11 junior Grand Slams and traveled to 20 countries to play in various ITF and WTA events.

As one of their top players, Francesca had the amazing experience of playing Fed Cup for the Philippines from 1991-1995 and again in 2003.  The first time she played was the last time they had all the countries in one place at Nottingham, England. She said it was a really cool experience seeing all of the top players, as well as playing against and meeting diverse teams from all over the world, including Chile, Jamaica, and Ireland.  The last time she played Fed Cup was in Tokyo for the Asia Oceania group when she was 27 and had come out of retirement from tennis while taking a break from her career in tech.  That year she played Sania Mirza, a highly ranked player on tour at the time.

After a successful junior career, she was recruited to play collegiate tennis at Cal Berkeley by one of her Philippine Federation Cup teammates who was the assistant coach at the time.  Her tennis success continued at Cal where she earned All-American status in doubles her freshman year and also qualified for the NCAA tournament individually three out of four years.  Francesca excelled in the classroom as well, earning Academic All-American and winning the award at Cal for graduating female athlete with the highest GPA. 

She studied business at Cal and got her MBA from Wharton in 2010.  Aside from tennis, her whole career has been in tech doing various roles from product management to marketing to analytics at both start-ups and public companies (Microsoft and DocuSign).  Currently, she lives in San Francisco and is the VP of Analytics at Early Warning Systems (the network operator of Zelle).  She leads data scientists, business intelligence developers, and other analytics professionals in building data products and solutions.

While it was difficult to play tennis regularly as she started out in the business world and then attended business school, tennis has always been in her life.  Over the years, meeting people at the local tennis club and playing in 5.0+ or 10.0 leagues were her main social outlets.  She started to get more serious in 2013 when a friend invited her to play 30 and over Indoor Nationals in Sacramento.  She won her first silver and bronze balls at that tournament.  Since then, she’s gone in waves of getting more serious, including playing in the US Open Wild Card tournament in New Haven in 2015 and then playing in several 45s events over the last year (where she added 2 gold and 2 silver balls to her collection).  As a result, Francesca was selected for the 45s Young Senior World Championship team and competed on Team USA last week in Lisbon, Portugal.  After many years of playing Fed Cup representing the Philippines, she was excited and proud to have USA on her jersey for the first time. In all likelihood, the first of many!