Following a series of losses in the early stages of the season, Park’s Girls tennis team hoped to pull out a win Sept. 14. Girls’ tennis faced off against Roosevelt in a back and forth match ending in a 4-3 loss for Park.
According to Senior Alison Garland, having a short preseason negatively impacts the team performance early in the season, but she is optimistic about the team’s progress.
“It’s been challenging, especially at the beginning,” Garland said. “Our preseason isn’t very long which hurts the start of the season, and I think overall the team is starting to work better in doubles teams.
Coach Kevin Jones said he has high hopes for this game and the season.
“As a first year coach, my expectations are for them to have fun and be competitive,” Jones said. “Tennis is a very emotional sport so there’s days when people aren’t happy and then days when people are happy.”
Senior Madeline Anklam said the team tries to get motivated before their matches.
“We try to warm up with the team like our players before the matches,” Anklam said. “We’ll do a team cheer, we’ll kind of go in a circle and motivate, say motivating things like a pep talk kind of.”
According to Garland, the team lost a lot of strong players this year, which has harmed the team’s performance..
“There’s been a lot of improvement but we’ve also had a lot of turnover this year,” Garland said. “We had 11 out of our 13 varsity players graduate last year so we had a totally new team this year with just two other girls and myself who are returning varsity this year. So I think a lot of our expectations are just to do our best and try and not necessarily beat as many people as we can but win as many points as possible.”
According to Madeline Anklam, she hasn’t been playing to the best of her best ability and her opponents have been challenging.
“I think I played well. I’ve kind of been in a slump lately,” Anklam said “The teams have been good.”
According to Coach Jones he is confident in his team’s ability to succeed later in the season.
“We want to just keep building on today,” Jones said. “As the season winds down we’ll see what the section tournament seeding is, and then pull out players out there and I know that they give 100% Every match and we’ll just have to see how it turns out.”
Tennis’ next game is 4:15 p.m. Sept. 18 at Park.
