After a week of only one practice on the courts, the girls’ tennis team went up against Sherando High School this past Saturday for their first match of the season. Due to weather, only singles matches were fully completed, freshmen exhibitionists Suzanne Fornadel and Katie Ramsey being the only two of eight athletes to win their matches. Fornadel, the seventh seed, won 10-5 and Ramsey, eighth, 10-1. Ramsey feels good about her performance, and was happy with how she did on Saturday.

“I think I played pretty well, I had good serves and my passes were pretty consistent.” Ramsey said. “I feel like I can improve on everything all around but specifically trying to get more winning shots.”

The next highest scorer was fourth seed sophomore Valeri Krasheninnikov, losing 5-10.

“I feel like I did okay and good at the same time because I performed well, I lasted longer than I usually do… I actually ran for the ball. I would judge the distance a little better and didn’t give up when my legs were really tired,” Krasheninnikov said. “Just in general I need improvement on my serving and volleying but other than that, cardio.”

As it is the first match of the season, Krasheninnikov had to adjust and get back into the flow of things.

“The girl I was playing with was very nice and understanding. I made a lot of goofy mistakes with scoring, I said the score wrong many times, but yeah, she was okay with that, and she was just a cool person overall.”

Coach Lawson Yoder was happy with the performance of his players, especially considering that Sherando was a state-semifinalist last year, beating the team in the conference semi-finals last year 5-2.

“I thought we played well I was really excited to see us play we’ve been practicing in preseason so long and we have a lot of new players new spots, so I was really excited and very happy about how we competed,” Yoder said. “[Sherando is] a very strong team and they returned four of their top six from last year; we have one of our top six back. It’s very very clear they’re a strong team, they may be the best team we play all year. Still though, as I was asking our players as they came off the court, ‘Do you feel overwhelmed? Did you feel blown off the court?’, and the answer I was seeing was no, we were pretty well matched.”

Yoder is very positive about what he has seen from the team already, and expects good things to come.

“I thought we have a good spirit on the team; I thought we were very very supportive of each other. We’re starting to learn our personality as a group and I like what I’m seeing. We work hard each practice, we support each other, it seems like we’re having fun and I know we’re getting to be better and better tennis players every day.”

As for improvement, that will come with each match.

“There’s no substitute for match experience, It’s a different feel out there playing someone with a different uniform color, keeping score, calling lines, people watching you,” Yoder said. “It’s just a different environment, and I enjoyed watching that and seeing how they reacted, so the more experience we have the better we’ll do.”