Following the last girls varsity tennis article, I was deluged with angry comments that I broke with my usual “creative” writing style from last year to just report what happened. Ok, I realize that only a couple people actually read these articles, so it would be hard to consider that a “deluge”, but trust me, they were upset.
So I will start this article by saying that it was hot. Really hot. In fact, according to Elias Sports Bureau, the 100+ degree temperature were the hottest on record for a match played at Acalanes on a Thursday in September against Carondelet when there was a Water Polo event going on at the same time with those athletes enjoying the nice cool water.
It was so hot that each match was a single pro set like is done in JV. For those of you who don’t know what a pro set is, it isn’t a set played by professionals necessarily, but rather a type of set played to eight games.
A few of the seniors weren’t able to play because for some reason they decided that going to visit colleges was more important than an early season tennis match, which led the Coaches to make some adjustments.
On the singles side, Lines 1-4 stayed the same with Aamena Shipchandler playing Line 1, Piper Duff Line 2, Emily Roberts Line 3, and Grace Colaco Line 4. Hetty Lofting stepped in for Sienna Moise to play Line 5, and Molly Jones stepped in for Kate Widmann to play Line 6.
On the doubles side, Lauren Foster and Ridhi Patel played Line 1 again, Grace Britto and Riley Zirkel moved up from Line 3 to Line 2, and Tatum McElhattan and Sadie Moise made their Varsity debuts at Line 3.
Emily won 8-2, Molly won 8-7, Grace Britto/Riley won 8-3 and were voted players of the match, and Tatum/Sadie won 8-6. Molly and Tatum/Sadie had great comeback wins, and Grace Colaco and Ridhi/Lauren narrowly lost 8-6 in hard fought, competitive matches.
The girls who decide not to switch to water polo or look at colleges next travel to Freedom High School to play in a tournament the weekend of September 14th