Women’s tennis team rebuilds
By Erica Granados
IV Leader Sports Writer, Sept. 11, 2003
The women’s tennis team opened the season with a rough start, losing 0-9 to Rock Valley.
Having to start from scratch, coach Steve Crick’s predictions for this year are not definite on how the team will do this season.
“I would have to think that this will be a rebuilding year for women’s tennis,” Crick said. “A lot of our success depends on how quickly the freshmen adjust to college level tennis and also a lot depends on our competition; we never really know how good our opponents are going to be because there is no way to know of them ahead of time.”
Recruiting six of the seven players for this year’s team will be a change from the past years because the freshmen number is greater than usual. The freshmen are going to have to adjust to playing college tennis, which is different from high school.
This year only the No. 6 player returned for last year’s team. Katie Claudnic moved up one spot this year to No. 5 and remains in the No. 3 spot for doubles.
New to the team this year are players No. 1 Lauren Lengfelder and No. 2 Kylie Mestelle, both from Ottawa; Danielle Saletzki at No. 3, from Princeton, Melissa Zavada at No. 4, from Streator, Laura Ladzinski at No. 6, and Katie Hoffert at No. 7, both from St. Bede.
Doubles teams are Lengfelder and Mestelle at No. 1, Saletzki and Zavada at No. 2, and Claudnic and Ladzinski at No. 3.
The women face will be facing Elgin Sept. 13. Crick says that will be a challenging match. The team’s chances seem to look better the following week when they will be matched up against Joliet.
Coach Crick said, “Once the players get back into shape, I think we have a good chance of having an equal amount of wins and losses.”
Crick was forced to put together this year’s team at short notice after the board of trustees considered eliminating the sport during the spring semester because of a lack of funds. The tennis teams and golf team have raised funds to support their programs this year.
The team has no home matches this year due to the fact of having one playable court at IVCC.