With only two tournaments left on the calendar for the fall season, the Wildcats went into Tuscaloosa’s Roberta Alison Fall Classic last weekend looking to squeeze every last drop of competition out of the experience.
Despite the three singles championships and two doubles championships the team captured, coach Claire Pollard says the team still needs to work on everything.
“Going down (to Tuscaloosa) is a huge adjustment. It opens your eyes to a lot of things,” Pollard said. “So I was pleased with the way the girls got the opportunity to grow and learn from that.”
Three Northwestern players made it to their draw’s respective Saturday singles championship matches and each emerged victorious. Freshman Maddie Lipp ran a convincing 6-1, 6-2 defeat against Furman’s Margaret Boyette to capture her draw’s championship, and freshman Brooke Rischbieth took her championship with a 6-4, 6-3 win against Skylar Holloway of LSU. In a decisive victory that Pollard called the highlight of the tournament, senior Nida Hamilton upset Natalia Maynetto of host school Alabama, 6-1, 6-2.
“I played (Maynetto) last year, and I hadn’t finished the match when I was down 7-6, 6-5,” Hamilton said. “I knew I could’ve done better, so I was excited for the match. I played really well.
Hamilton said the tournament helped the team prepare as they competed head-to-head against many top players. She added that the difficult matches helped the team compare themselves to others across the country.
On top of the three singles championships that the Cats captured, the team also seized two doubles championships. Hamilton and Rischbieth won their final round match 8-6 when they took down Clemson’s team of Yana Koroleva and Tristen Dewar. Lipp also teamed up with senior Belinda Niu to defeat LSU’s Noel Scott and Abigail Owens, capturing the championship with an 8-3 win.
“I really focused on my competitiveness,” Lipp said about her two championship matches. “Belinda and I had a rough (semi-final) match against Furman. … I guess my best moment from the tournament was coming back from that match going into finals with a better mentality.”
As a team, the Cats have crafted one of the strongest competitive mentalities in the NCAA. Don’t believe it? Just look to their 15 straight Big Ten Conference Championships for confirmation. However, success is never guaranteed, and with a particularly young team this year, building confidence has been a big focus.
Pollard admits that confidence is a rare commodity and that at this early stage in the year everything needs work.
“If anyone’s got any spare (confidence), we’ll take it,” said Pollard. “We’re young and we’ve done a lot of learning over the fall, but we have to get a lot better.”
In the NCAA, tennis is a spring sport, so NU still has some time for fine-tuning before conference play begins. However, the fall season ITA tournaments are rapidly coming to a close, and the team is running out of time to learn in the competitive atmosphere that the tournaments offer.
This weekend the Cats will compete in their final tournament of the fall, the Wildcat Fall Duals, in Evanston, where they will look to lay more solid groundwork for the upcoming spring season.
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