The University of Idaho Argonaut

Vandals continue to show improvement
Scott Stone
Argonaut

After a lapse in their performance, the men’s tennis team is hoping that the week off is what they needed to get back into the swing of things.
They played San Diego State on Friday where they suffered a disappointing 0-7 loss.
“We just had a very poor performance against San Diego State,” said Idaho coach Jeff Beaman. “Our guys put out a horrible effort against a good team.”
The team sat down after the loss and discussed what happened and what needed to be changed before they took on Northern Colorado on Sunday.

The men worked things out and came back Sunday to sweep Northern Colorado 7-0.
Northern Colorado was a good win before the team got a week off and get closer to the end of the season, Beaman said. Hopefully the men will come back confident and hungry for some more wins, he said.
Junior Hugh McDonald said that these two matches were important in getting the team back to where they want to be.
“It was good to put us back on track and get that winning feeling again,” McDonald said.
The Vandals continue to maintain a winning record of 11-9, but members of the team believe they could be doing better.
“I’m happy to have a winning record — we’ve surpassed the win total from last year,” Beaman said, “but I’m not happy with how we’ve been playing recently.”

With the win over Northern Colorado, the men ended a four game losing streak.
“There have been a lot of matches where we could have done a lot better,” McDonald said. “Every team has a few bad matches each year.”
The women’s team showed improvement as they played four matches over the break and won three of them without any trouble.
They began their break Thursday and Friday, sweeping both Willamette and Portland State 7-0, but looked like a completely different team on Saturday as they lost to the University of Portland 1-6.
The Vandals were confident they could beat Portland after watching them almost lose to Montana on Friday, but Beaman said it just wasn’t their day.

“They’re a good team,” Beaman said, “and we had a really off day.”
The women came back on Sunday and beat Montana 6-1 to increase their overall record to 8-8.
Beaman is happy with the performance from the women’s team and said that 8-8 is a good record for a team that had a record of 3-7 earlier this season.
“They’ve really improved,” Beaman said. “We could end the year with a really strong record —well above 500.”