Women's tennis plays big short-handed
On Wednesday Sept. 18, the women’s tennis teams traveled to Atlanta, GA for the 13th Annual HBCU National Tennis Championships. This year was the first time in over a decade that Howard made the trip down south for the event, which featured over 20 men’s and women's tennis teams from historically black colleges nationwide.
Howard’s women’s tennis team came into the tournament shorthanded with just five team members, however, they were still able to finish second overall in the tournament. Although, head coach Larry Strickland had aspirations of first place, he was very pleased with his team’s performance.
“My expectations going in was to win the national championship,” he said. “I’ve never been one to get in the starting blocks to come in second, but with all things considered only coming in with five players and everyone else having eight, it was a very strong performance.”
The tournament, which awarded points to teams for every individual match won, definitely favored larger squads. Howard went undefeated in the first round of play and had three singles players make the semi-finals, while both Howard doubles teams made the finals.
Strickland believes that the team’s performance in the tournament was crucial to rest of the season.
“This tournament set a standard for the ladies to build off of,” he said. “There’s still a lot of things we need to work on to be MEAC Champions, but we have a team with girls who can do very well this year.”
Last season, the team went down in the first round of the MEAC Championships, Howard’s worst finish in the tournament in recent history. This year the Bison are looking to bounce back, and Strickland believes that they can do just that.
“We had a lot of unfortunate things working against us last year,” Strickland said. “Hopefully we can take a healthy team into the championships this year and then we’ll be fine.”
Bethune-Cookman University were this year’s HBCU National Champions, and they’re also the team who took out Howard at last year’s MEAC Championships. Strickland says the team has some work to do in order to defeat them and other MEAC powerhouses in order to become conference champions.
“We have to continue to improve our stokes and continue to believe in our belief system,” Strickland said.
The team will be back in action and looking to improve on Oct. 11 at the Navy Blue Gold Tournament in Annapolis, Maryland.