As the semester comes to a close, so too does the women’s tennis team’s fall season. The Hoosiers are close 2016 out with the Western Michigan University Super Challenge in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The tournament, which consists of four doubles and three singles slots for each team, will be played during a three-day period, so everybody will get a lot of opportunities to play matches.
IU Coach Lin Loring said he is pleased with the fact he can focus solely on coaching his players this time around rather than running the tournament, which he did during the IU Regional and Hoosier Classic.
“We’ll be able to talk more x’s and o’s when I’m more consistently able to watch points and pick up patterns and shot selection and things like that,” Loring said.
IU will compete against Western Michigan, Michigan State, Cleveland State and DePaul this weekend. Since this is the final tournament before the official spring season, the women’s team will look to make a few small adjustments to their game.
“I think I can be mentally stronger,” graduate student Alicia Robinson said. “I lost a few matches to tiebreaker last time, so if I was mentally stronger, I think that could’ve made a difference.”
As for freshman Emma Love, she said she looks to continue her success in doubles competition from the IU Regional. Instead of teaming up with freshman Pauline Jahren, she’ll pair up with sophomore Caitlin Bernard.
“I’m going to try to be really aggressive at the net,” Love said. “I think Caitlin sets me up really well and personally I’m also trying to just be more consistent with my first service percentage and my ground strokes.”
In IU’s last tournament, the team was split up. Now, with them being together, Loring is going to put most women in the spots they would usually play in the regular season.
“I think this weekend will be a really good experience,” Love said. “It’s our last time to compete against other schools, and I think this is going to really valuable, and hopefully it will be a really positive weekend before we have that long break going into the regular season.”
