Despite a thrilling individual victory for the team, the women’s tennis team once again came up short.
The Warriors dropped two more matches, extending their losing streak to five. The Warriors lost to Cerritos College 8-1 last Tuesday at home then to Long Beach City College 7-2 last Thursday in an away game.
The team’s next game is today at Mt. San Antonio against a skilled team that beat EC two weeks ago 9-0 at El Camino.
The lone point in the 8-1 loss against Cerritos came from freshman Sasha Miller after an exciting tiebreaker round.
“She stuck in there and did her best, and she pulled through very well,” Teila Roberson, assistant coach, said.
Miller, who plays in the teams #5 slot, was up the first set before losing the second set, at which point a ten-point tiebreaker was played, which she won.
While the score may not indicate it, the rest of the team was very competitive and made the other team fight for every point, Robertson said.
“All of us had long rallies and very interesting shots,” Cressan Delima, freshman, said about Tuesday’s game.
The team is slowly improving as they gain more experience, as the 7-2 score against LBCC indicates.
Since EC will play every team at least twice, the Warriors will look for redemption against both these colleges later this month.
“They just need confidence, Steve (Van Kanegan, coach) is doing a great job getting them trained and ready for their matches,” Robertson said.
During the teams’ fast-paced practices, they have been working on everything from strategies to different types of shots to making sure the players hustle to return balls across the court.
“At this point we are playing very competitively, it’s just a matter of slowly gaining experience,” Steve Van Kanegan, head coach, said.
Both players and coaches stress that to get their first win of the regular season, they must keep their heads held high and apply what they’ve been learning at practice to their actual competitions.
Delima said that in previous efforts, the team wasn’t mentally prepared for their matches and wasn’t able to grasp the things that they learned in practice, but that they finally began understanding and executing what they practiced in the game against Cerritos.
“They practice very well, they are so comfortable with each other,” Robertson said, “I’d like them to bring that confidence and comfort level to the court when they’re facing their actual opponents.”
