Every year at the end of January, the world’s best tennis players gather down under in Sydney, Australia for the first grand slam event of the year. It signifies the kick off to a season which will extend long into the fall.
And the beginning of the professional tennis season also marks the beginning of the collegiate one. And this season, both the Saint Louis University men’s and the women’s teams have gotten off to solid starts as they look to cap their final season in Conference USA.
The women’s team kicked off their spring season down in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with matches against Tulsa and Oral Roberts.
They dropped the match against Tulsa but quickly rebounded against Oral Roberts.
However, Oral Roberts awaited them for a rematch last weekend in a cluster of duals held down in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The first of the duals came against Oral Roberts and if coach Jon Zych would have been asked how the matches would have ideally gone, he probably would have drawn it up something like this.
The Billikens swept Oral Roberts, 6-0 in singles play and 3-0 in doubles play. The Billikens boast not a single player older than a sophomore on their squad. They are headlined by Katerina Lozanova.
She won her match over Oral Roberts’ Sonia Bailey 6-0, 6-0. The same went for sophomore Amanda Hellberg who also put up a couple of goose eggs in her straight set victory over Adrianna Garcia in the number two singles position. The Billikens rode their sweeping victory over Oral Roberts into their next dual against Wichita State and came away with another victory, 5-2. However, the Bills could not keep their winning streak going as they dropped their final dual of the weekend to the host team, Arkansas. The Razorbacks are nationally ranked and looked every bit of it as they won each and every match they played against the Bills.
Next up for the Billikens is a four match homestand, getting kicked- off this Friday when the Bills host Illinois State.
The men’s team fared equally well in their opening dual of the spring as they dropped Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, 7-2.
Senior Tom de Larzac, the number one seed for the Billikens and the senior statesman on a team that is filled with sophomores and juniors, set the tone by knocking off Matthew Warner from SIUE in straight sets. Freshman James Wilson, the Billikens two seed, took a bit longer to win his match, being extended to three sets in defeating Justin Free.
The men are also next in action this Friday, however they will be traveling up to Indianapolis, to square off against Butler University. The men are now 2-0 on the year.
