William O'Connell with the successful Pacific Oceania women's team Photo: Oceania Tennis
They were hindered by geography and a low ranking, but online team talks proved invaluable to overcoming obstacles as the Pacific Oceania women's tennis gained promotion in the world's top team competition.
The six-strong Billie Jean Cup team contains three players from Papua New Guinea, one from Fiji and one from the Northern Marianas Islands. The coach, meanwhile, is based in the United States.
But this month the team won six matches in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to gain promotion to World Group I by playing "greedy tennis".
Violet Apisah of PNG and Carol Lee of the Marianas led the way in the way in the singles with Violet's two sisters, Abigail Tere-Apisah and Patricia Apisah, and Saoirse Breen from Fiji backing them up.
Their non-playing coach, William O'Connell, has represented Fiji and the Pacific Oceania Davis Cup teams, and is now an International Tennis Federation advanced coach, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
He worked with the women online as he was only able to be on court with one team member at his base in North Carolina.
O'Connell said the distances can become hurdles but they overcame that.
"It is tricky. But once I found out I was Billie Jean King Cup captain, and we figured out our team, we got on a group chat.
"And we did a lot of talking prior to the event and did some online team-building exercises.
"I made the offer to all the girls to come to my end of the world to train. And one of them took me up on that offer. So even though we are separated by huge distances we did a good job of team-building before we got to Kuala Lumpur."
The winning Pacific Oceania tennis team Photo: Oceania Tennis
Furthermore, Pacific Oceania were seeded 12th of 12 teams from around Asia, despite beating Singapore and Malaysia in last year's competition.
"We started at 12 but knew we would be dangerous, and we competed pretty well. And a couple of things went our way. We did really well to defy our 12th-placed seeding," said O'Connell.
"It started off really rough. We played the two best teams in our pool back-to-back and the girls played some extremely greedy tennis.
"Their response to adversity was incredible. Yeah, we had the ball bounce our way a couple of times. But once we'd played Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei [the top-seeded team] it would then have been hard to not make it to the qualifying rounds.
"Chinese Taipei had a multiple Grand Slam champion on their team, and a former world number five doubles player. We played some tough tennis and we were able to beat them on day two."
Still, they had to see off Indonesia in the play-off round and O'Connell said the playing schedule was firmly in their favour.
"I think what helped us into that was we had done our dirty work early on, in pool play, while Indonesia had their three toughest matches right at the end.
"So we were going into that promotional match feeling a lot better than what we thought they might be feeling. We tried to make the beginning of the match physical and apply some pressure."
The men's Davis Cup team was also promoted from its group while competing in Colombo, Sri Lanka with two wins from three games.
