Through skill and teamwork and solid coaching, the tennis team achieved an undefeated season this fall, using a new warm-up to help them gain muscle memory for their matches.
The team changes each year but what doesn’t change is the community of support they give each other. 8th-grade tennis player Nora Alikhani says that they had a great season because of the strong players and the way they would strategize before each game. Despite the challenging tryouts, the formation of a small yet powerful team proved crucial to their undefeated run. Alikhani particularly enjoyed “the matches and the team bonding experience.”
While the tennis players played hard to have an undefeated season, the coaches did a lot behind the scenes to make sure everything ran smoothly. Girls tennis coach Jeniffer Speir thinks that the season went as well as it could have gone; they were undefeated in the season and even won the final championship games.“We won every single match and not only that but all top five of the [individual] matches in each [team] match won.” She says the tennis players made a lot of progress throughout the season by coming to practice and working very hard.
This year the Upper School Varsity and JV coaches came to teach the team a new warm-up for them to do every day, one which helped them with their matches. Alikhani notes that the team benefited from this close involvement from the JV and Varsity coaches. “They taught us a new warm-up that we did every practice,” she says. Speir says that having them come helped the team a lot and made it one of her highlights from the season. “The JV and Varsity coach shared with us their warm-up routine; it takes about thirty minutes and it works every single kind of strategic stroke. We would do that to start our practice which is kind of cool.” This new routine, helped the players develop strong muscle memory for their matches and play consistently.
Alikhani explains that for next season she wants to practice more and get even better throughout the season. She also wants to get closer with her teammates. After matches, the team would go get lunch together and bond. “A few of the girls went and got lunch together on the day of the championship.”
Alikhani says she really enjoyed the matches they played at Lovett because they had good players and it was a real challenge for the team. “They were good competition so it was good matches.” She also appreciated the way the whole team would cheer each other on. “The team supported each other during matches.”
Not everything during the season went according to plan, however. The team suffered a setback during the hurricane. “The courts at Westminster, during the hurricane, got flooded and weren’t playable,” said Alikhani. This stopped them from playing for a couple of weeks, but they pushed through and had a great season nonetheless.