Pack continues improvement

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 12:50 AM

The Wolf Pack women’s tennis team continued to improve on its fall season with a solid showing at the Wilson/ITA Division I Mountain Regional Championships held in Las Vegas last week.

“I think the team did extremely well overall,” head coach Sylvain Malroux said. “We had only 14 girls playing and two doubles teams and one of the doubles teams reached the quarterfinals, so the doubles teams did great and the singles players did really good as well. This tournament is going to help (us) in the future and especially for the spring.”

One of the top performers for the team was once again freshman Emma Verberne, who reached the quarterfinals of the championships.

“She’ll be probably ranked in the top 10 or top eight in our region, which is really good for a freshman,” Malroux said. “She upset a lot of really good players throughout the week.”

Aside from Verberne, the team also had impressive performances from juniors Lais Ogata and Florence De Vrye, with Ogata winning five matches and De Vrye battling for two match victories.

As for areas of improvement, Malroux said that one of the key things the team needs to focus on is finishing matches better.

“We put ourselves in the situation to win matches and sometimes we just have a little bit of a tough time closing out our matches,” he said. “That’s one thing that we are going to have to do better in the future. We put ourselves in the situation where we can be very successful and I think it is more mental than anything else, and realizing when we need to be on top and make sure we understand the momentum of the matches. Once we understand this and once we can play aggressively in those big points, we are going to be really good next spring.”

Damian Tromerhauser can be reached at sports@nevadasagebrush.com.