Hoosiers to finish fall season with 3-day tournament

After a one-month break from tournament play, the IU women’s tennis team will be back in action this weekend in Kalamazoo, Mich., for the Western Michigan Super Challenge.

Penn State, Iowa State, Bowling Green, Western Michigan, Notre Dame, Louisville, Marquette and DePaul will be Indiana’s competitors in the nine-team field.

Matches will begin Friday, and the tournament will conclude Sunday.

IU Coach Lin Loring said the tournament will be organized in eight draws of eight players each for singles play and four doubles draws.

Assuming every team brings all of its players, there will be six opponents, who were selected in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association women’s preseason singles rankings.

Penn State’s No. 52 Petra Januskova is the second-highest ranked player in the field behind IU’s No. 50 senior Leslie Hureau.

DePaul’s Jasmin Kling is ranked No. 73 in the country.

A pair of Louisville players, No. 120 Julia Fellerhoff and No. 124 Rebecca Shine, also made the preseason rankings.

No. 98 Britney Sanders and No. 106 Jennifer Kellner are on a Notre Dame squad that the Hoosiers have already faced once in the fall season. At Indiana’s adidas Hoosier Classic in September, the Hoosiers split their singles matches with the Fighting Irish and went 1-2 in doubles matches.

Loring said the team could go through the entire draw and never play Notre Dame. He said depending on how the women are divided in the draws, IU’s second-best singles player could hypothetically play Notre Dame’s fourth-best singles player.

“I hope that we play against Notre Dame again, because they’ll be the best competition in the tournament,” Loring said. “However, it all depends on which players win and lose.”

IU has spent a lot of time working on serving and returning since Georgia’s Bulldog Classic in mid-October. Loring said every player has focused on two or three parts of her game, and individual work has been the emphasis of practice in the past three weeks.

“We hope that we see an improvement in our returns in singles and doubles, as well as in our serving,” Loring said. “We’ve done a lot of work in pattern play, so we hope to see a lot of improvement in point construction too.”

The Western Michigan Invitational will be the last chance in this calendar year for the women to fine-tune their skills in match play against competitors from opposing universities.

“The tournament will show everyone what things they need to work on over the next two months,” Loring said. “We will only be with them for two weeks out of the next two months under NCAA rules, and we’re limited in how much time we can spend with them in those two weeks. As a coaching staff, there’s not a lot that we can do with them, and a lot of their training will have to be on their own when they go home for Christmas break.”

The tournament is scheduled to start with doubles at 10 a.m. Friday, and singles matches will begin at 1:30 p.m.