Team ready for Fighting Irish

After suffering its first losses of the season to Kentucky and No. 25 Tennessee on the road last weekend, No. 60 IU will look to rebound against No. 22 Notre Dame this Sunday. The Hoosiers will face the Fighting Irish at 11 a.m. at the IU Tennis Center, where IU is 5-0 this season.

Despite losing both matches last weekend, IU Coach Lin Loring said he did not modify the team’s practice regimen leading up to the match against Notre Dame.

“[After losing] 4-3 matches you always second guess yourself, but we’re probably going to have eight more of those the rest of the year,” Loring said. “You just have to get a break, there’s nothing really big that we need to work on. There’s really no reason to re-invent the wheel.”

He said IU played well enough to win both matches against two good opponents.
“It’s just one of those perfect storms where if it could go wrong, it did,” Loring said. “We had a lot of positives from it. We were literally five points from winning the match against Tennessee and we were probably two points from the match against Kentucky because the No. 1 doubles was 6-6 and we had some deuce ads.”

Loring said he expects IU to play another close match against Notre Dame.

“They’re really good,” he said. “They’re out of the top 20 right now, but they’ve been in the top 20 for the past seven or eight years. I wouldn’t doubt if this one is going to be a 4-3 match.”

Notre Dame is 5-3 and has played host to Big Ten opponents. The Fighting Irish have defeated Bowling Green, Illinois, No. 22 Georgia Tech, Tennessee and Iowa. No. 17 Nebraska, No. 24 Purdue and No. 10 Northwestern have all topped Notre Dame in dual matches this season. The Fighting Irish will face Baylor at home on Friday before traveling to Bloomington.

Notre Dame junior Britney Sanders is the No. 74 singles player in the country. The Fighting Irish have three doubles pairs ranked. Julie Sabacinski/Sanders are No. 26, Sanders/Julie Vrabel are No. 30 and Jennifer Kellner/Molly O’Koniewski are No. 59.

IU has faced Notre Dame twice in tournaments last fall. At the adidas Hoosier Classic, IU was 5-5 in singles and 1-2 in doubles against the Fighting Irish. At the Western Michigan University Super Challenge, the Hoosiers were a perfect 3-0 in singles and they split their two doubles matches against Notre Dame.

“We played well against them in our fall tournament so we’ve seen them before,” Loring said. “They’re really good, they’re really deep and we’re going to have to play really well to beat them.”

The Fighting Irish have had IU’s number in the new millennium. The archived results on IUHoosiers.com dating back to the 1997-98 season and IU has not recorded a victory against Notre Dame in that time span. In the past seven years against the Fighting Irish, IU hasn’t scored more than one point in a dual match.

“We’ll probably have to play as well as we did against Tennessee and a little better if we’re going to beat them,” Loring said.