Coming into the spring 2016 season, the No. 51-ranked Utah women’s tennis team fields a very young squad, with two freshmen, four sophomores, one junior and only one senior.
Head coach Mat Iandolo was slightly worried going into the team’s first match of the spring season, saying, “My biggest concern coming into this was we have a young team coming into their first big match.”
As it turned out, he didn’t need to be concerned at all. The Utes played like a veteran team, dominating the Gonzaga Bulldogs on Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, winning 6-1.
The team started off the Sunday matinee winning the doubles point. Freshman Taylor Calton and junior Luisa Gerstner Da Rosa, a native of Porto Alegre, Brazil, teamed up to win the No. 3 doubles match against Gonzaga’s Domonique Garley and Franziska Koehler by a score of 6-4. In the No. 2 doubles slot, the lone senior on this year’s team, Sarah Richter, and sophomore Alexia Petrovic put away the Bulldogs’ Melanie Yates and Alex Bourguignon 6-4.
In the No. 1 doubles slot, sophomore Margo Pletcher and freshman Brianna Turley were in the lead 5-4 against the Zags’ Samantha Polayes and Sophie Whittle, but when Utah clinched the doubles point after the teams of Calton/Rosa and Richter/Petrovic won their respective matches, the match was halted with the Utes at match point, 40-15.
Gonzaga put its first and only point on the board after Whittle, at the No. 1 slot, defeated Utah’s Pletcher, 6-4, 6-2.
The rest of the match was all Utah. The Utes showed why they deserve to be nationally ranked, winning all their singles matches in the two through six slots. At No. 2 singles, Richter dispatched Gonzaga’s Nevada Apollo, 6-1, 6-2.
On the No. 3 court, Ute freshman Brianna Turley locked up her first college victory, dominating Polayes, 6-2, 6-0. Jena Cheng beat Alex Bourguignon by a score of 6-1, 6-3 in the No. 4 singles slot, while Calton held off the Zags’ Graciela Rosas.
The No. 6 singles match was the most interesting of the morning. In the first set, Utah’s Petrovic seemed to be cruising to another easy win for the Utes, grabbing the first set from Garley, 6-2. Garley fought back in the second set, winning the frame 6-4, but Petrovic prevailed in the super tiebreaker, winning 10-5 to give Utah its fifth singles victory of the match.
Iandolo was happy about his team’s performance.
“I thought they did a great job of handling everything involved in playing a first match,” he said.
The Utes will travel to Santa Barbara, Calif. next, where they will take on the University of California, Santa Barbara Gauchos. The match is on Jan. 22 and will start at 2:30 p.m. MST.
Utah will play two matches in Santa Barbara — one vs. UCSB and one vs. Oklahoma — before returning home to Salt Lake City for a four-match homestand against Denver, Utah State, Boise State and Weber State.
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