This past weekend was a special and unique coaching weekend. Yes the team went 3-0 and moved one step closer to one of our goals of winning the NWC title. But more interesting was that my 8 year old daughter made the road trip with the team to Portland. I honestly can’t remember seeing her so excited (with the exception of Christmas). All week all she could talk about was going on a trip with the team. When I woke her up Friday morning she jumped out of bed and rushed upstairs to start her morning because it was the big day. Was a lot of fun watching the team interact with her — she had 12 big brothers who were willing to playing catch, run around after her, and/or carrying her around. It was a weekend she will remember for a long time!
Feb 212011
What a fun trip to Portland. Even though we didn’t play until today we decided to travel to Forest Grove, OR on Friday night to watch our basketball teams play Pacific. I would like to think we gave our women’s basketball team a bit of lift. I’m not sure if it was the very loud cheering or the shock of seeing the men’s tennis team with “Missionaries!” painted across their chests but whatever it was the women’s team a 22-0 run once we arrived at the gym! By virtual of the win the women clinched the #4 seed in the upcoming conference tournament. We stayed on to cheer on the men’s team but unfortunately they dropped a heart breaker. Congratulations to Coach Ferenz and Coach Bridgeland — both have done a tremendous with the Whitman basketball programs. The women finished the year as the #4 team in the conference and the men finished #2!
Today (Sunday) was a long, cold day of tennis. This morning we started off playing Pacific University at their covered courts. It was certainly chilly in the morning — in fact, high during temp during the match was 42 with a wind chill of 39!!!! Fortunately going into the weekend we knew it was going to be cold so everyone brought heavy jackets, gloves and long underwear.
The cold weather wasn’t our only problem today. We played a much improved Pacific team in their covered facility. The Pacific facility features three covered courts but the screens surrounding the courts are normal windscreens. With a covered roof and normal wind screens around the courts the lighting is very strange. The layout makes tracking the ball very difficult — almost like watching a ball under a strobe light.
In doubles #2 (ET and Jeff) started off strong going up 6-0 in about 30 minutes. Jeff and ET’s tremendous energy fired up the rest of the team and got us on the board with a quick 8-1 win. At #3 Quin and Matt won 8-3 and at #1 Andrew and Conor were deadlocked at 5-5 when they went on a roll winning 3 straight games.
In singles we maintained our strong play sweeping 5 of the matches in straight sets. Our only loss was at #3 singles where Jeff ran into a buzz-saw freshman Troy Zuroske. Troy played great tennis hammering huge serves all match. His serve coupled with the strange lighting made for a rough day for Jeff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Zuroske playing #1 for the Boxers in the next fews. After watching him play today I’m convinced he will be one of the top players in the NWC Conference.
Once the Pacific match finished we made sandwiches and headed to George Fox for our afternoon match. After a short warm-up we took to the courts to play an incredibly fired up Fox team. It was fun to see the Bruins completely fired up and ready to battle us for every point. I know their energy made us raise our level of play.
Once again Jeff and ET got us going with with a solid start (I think they again went up 6-0). Both #2 doubles and #3 doubles finished with 8-2 victories. At #1 doubles Andrew and Conor broke open a close match winning the final four games posting an 8-4 victory.
In singles we sat our normal #3 (ET) and #4 (Jeff). This gave Adriel Borshanksy (#5) and Steve Roston (#6) the opportunity to get in some valuable match play experience. Both rose to the occassion winning 6-1, 6-1, and 6-2, 6-1. The most competitive match of the day was at #1 where Conor Holton-Burke got a measure of revenge (Barnett handed Conor his only conference loss last year) defeating Scott Barnett 6-4, 5-7, 10-6. A bit of an interesting match. In the 2nd set Conor got up an early break and served for the 2nd set at 5-4 only to get broke and then drop the set. However in the tie-break he played inspired tennis racing out to a 6-0 lead before winning 10-5.
Big kudos to Coach Ninteman, he has turned around the George Fox tennis program and I’m sure they will be a force within the conference for a long time.
We finish our road trip tomorrow at 1pm match in Salem against Willamette. Even with warm weather in the forecast (high of 52), Willamette has decided to play the match off campus at an indoor tennis club (Courthouse)a few miles from campus.
Links to the matches
Whitman 8 Pacific 1
Whitman 9 George Fox 0
Special thanks to the Mah and La Cava families for the incredible hospitality this weekend.