Women's Tennis Kicks Off Home Schedule

Sophomore Elena Strakhova

By Elena Strakhova -Women's Tennis

Jan. 31, 2012 

The women’s tennis team started their dual season campaign with a set of three home matches at the Franklin Athletic Club. It was a long week with three days of high-level competition, three days of hard-working practices and a day-off. This year we have only five girls while we need at least six. That means that each team has a small handicap on us – they automatically win one point due to player shortage. But I would not underestimate our “Outstanding Titan Five!” All of us are talented, hard-working and passionate, and I believe that despite all the small details that are not counting towards our favor, we will do better this year than we did last year.

All three home matches were scheduled to start pretty late (around 7-8pm), so we had plenty of time to “break the sweat” in the morning, rest at noon and have a nice team dinner before the match. It was very nice of our coach to go to the nice restaurants (probably that is the reason why we were fueled with energy for all three matches). We were not able to win any doubles matches against Western, Eastern and Xavier, but every match we were closer than the previous, and we left our best on the court in order to win those doubles. With an unbelievable support from fellow UDM students, Franklin crowd, men’s team and of course parents we were able to compete at a very high level. This year, I feel that we are a team as a whole – we are close not only on court, but off court as well. I enjoy it.

 Yesterday was our first doubleheader match with our men’s and women’s teams against Xavier’s men’s and women’s team. It was a lot of fun, even though the guys took the front courts (as usual :-). But I still enjoy any of the home matches, despite extra pressure from people who are coming to watch you and are expecting you to win. We were very close to taking a doubles point against Xavier – Amanda and I fell 6-8, but still we did not implement our chances. However, Raina and Chloe were even closer than we were as they lost on a tie-breaker, which was twice as impressive. This is only the second time they played together and they have improved so much already. Singles were close, even though the scores did not make that seem so.

We are heading to Ball State this Friday and are hoping to finally bring everything together and convert our desires into victories.