Loring’s team earns a myriad of singles victories in Georgia Invite

The rain did not stop the women’s tennis team from playing hard on Friday at the Georgia Invitational in Athens, Ga.

In the weather-shortened first day, the Hoosiers only scratched across one doubles victory. As the tournament played out, however, IU rallied and gathered in multiple singles victory.

Each Hoosier played in two matches with different partners in each match because the tournament is a preseason event and formatted in a round-robin style. The scores do not go on the team’s record but count for the individuals.

The tournament featured four ranked doubles teams in the nation’s top 50, according to the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s Sept. 4 rankings. The Hoosiers lost to all four of those teams, but the matches were highly competitive.

Junior Lindsey Stuckey and sophomore Myriam Sopel won their match against the Duke duo of Jessi Robinson and Tara Iyer 8-2 for IU’s only doubles win. The pairing of sophomore Katya Zapadalova and senior Sigrid Fischer lost to the third-ranked team from Duke 8-4 while Hoosier senior Alba Berdala and sophomore Maria Guerreiro lost to senior Amanda Rales and junior Jennifer Stevens of Virginia, ranked No. 48, 8-4.
IU coach Lin Loring was happy with the how the different doubles teams played.

“We had good play in doubles,” he said. “We got to experiment with our doubles teams. Some teams had never played together even in practice. We tried a lot of different doubles combinations.”

On day two of the tournament, each player gained practice by playing two individual matches, which is what the team was looking forward to doing.

“We are looking forward to getting matches,” co-captain Fischer said. “We need to get used to the courts. In international play we have clay courts so we can’t slide as much here.”

Guerreiro won her match in straight sets 6-2, 6-3 while Stuckey also won one of her matches in three sets, including a 7-5 final set. Sopel picked up a win 6-3, 6-2, against Katarina Reveche of Wake Forest.

Zapadalova also got a victory in two sets on Saturday 6-0, 6-4. Sophomore Charlotte Martin, who was ranked No. 121 nationally to start off the season, also won a match 6-1, 7-5 against Laura Van de Stroet from Ole Miss.

On day three of competition were four doubles matches and eight singles matches. The heat took its toll on the women because it was about 91 degrees.

“We played a little better today,” Loring said. “The heat exposed our lack of conditioning. You could really tell which teams were from the South and used to the heat.”

The team has only had five days of practice under its belt and is expected to come back and work on conditioning and other individual skills. Although the tournament didn’t have as many victories as Loring would have liked, it did show what the team needs to improve for the start of the season in January.

“It wasn’t unexpected,” Loring said. “It was just unfortunate.”