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After a two week break, the University of Idaho men’s tennis team headed for the mountains of Colorado while the women’s team headed south to the rival city of Boise.
Competing in Colorado Springs, the men’s team defeated both Idaho State and the Air Force Academy, finishing 2-2 for the weekend despite the challenges of high altitude and the absence of their No. 1 player Andrey Potapkin.
The women weren’t as fortunate as they went 0-3 against Boise State, Northern Arizona and Wyoming.
They’ll be looking to improve on their doubles play this week after losing seven of nine doubles matches over the weekend.
MEN
The high altitude proved to be a challenge for the men this weekend but they demonstrated resiliency by defeating both Idaho State and the Air Force Academy.
“We got two wins in rough conditions,” said Idaho coach Jeff Beaman. “It was a very hard adjustment, the ball travels quicker through the air than we’re used to.”
Co-captain Rob Chalkley said the change in altitude was a challenge, but he was content with finishing 2-2 for the weekend.
“We knew they were going to be tough matches,” Chalkley said. “Walking around you could feel there was no air to breathe.”
The Vandals came out swinging on Friday, winning their first match of the weekend against Idaho State (4-2), which extended their winning streak to four matches, but couldn’t keep it going as they lost to the University of Denver later that afternoon (0-4).
The Vandals got it together on Saturday and defeated the Air Force Academy (4-3), which turned out to be a tougher win than expected.
Beaman said they showed up Saturday to find that the lines had been put on the court improperly, making the service box too small.
“Something which I’ve never seen before in my history of any sort of tennis,” Beaman said. “The service box being too small is like playing basketball where the goal is 2 feet too high.”
“It made for some pretty interesting tennis,” Beaman said.
The men finished the weekend on Sunday with a tough loss against Wichita State (0-5).
WOMEN
The women had a rough weekend, finishing 0-3 and losing seven of their nine doubles matches.
Beaman said going into practice this week, there will be a lot of meetings looking at players and figuring out what we’re doing wrong.
The most important thing is to “keep on working on all of them growing as players and learning more about college tennis,” Beaman said.
The women changed up the doubles pairings for the Wyoming match and won the doubles point. Beaman is hopeful that this is their answer to more wins in doubles matches.
“We made a change and it worked,” Beaman said. “We’re going to evaluate the doubles teams and are definitely going away from the pairings we started last week with.”
The highlight of the weekend for the women was that sophomore Barbara Maciocha finished the weekend with a perfect record of 3-0.
“I was very impressed,” Beaman said. “She had been struggling with some injuries. For her to pull out three wins against that level of competition was a great weekend and shows that she can be a great player down the road.”
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