Women's Tennis

This is not the way Minnesota wanted to start Big Ten play.

A rash of injuries and a tough non-conference schedule have left the Gophers women’s tennis team with a seven-match losing streak and struggling to get back on track.

Although the wins have been tough to come by for the Gophers, head coach Tyler Thomson believes his team is still as competitive as any.

“We really have one of the most talented teams we’ve ever had,” said Thomson. “We just have to get healthy.”

Minnesota opened up its spring break trip with a 4-3 loss at Missouri.

Despite a pair of tough losses last week, the Minnesota women’s tennis team understands that there is no reason to panic.

“Every good team goes through this,” junior Magdalena Wiecha said. “If we give 100 percent we’ll be fine, and the results will come.”

Head coach Tyler Thomson said the Gophers have been meeting throughout the week to discuss how they can get back on the right track.

The Gophers women’s tennis team opened its home season Friday night with a 5-2 loss to Oklahoma but came back Sunday with a 5-2 win over previously undefeated Oregon.

Despite going 1-1 on the weekend, Minnesota head coach Tyler Thomson was satisfied with his team’s performance.

“We’ve got some really good spots and some spots of inconsistency,” Thomson said. “We’ve just got to keep working on putting up the same behavior and same effort every single match and every single point.”

Women’s tennis head coach Tyler Thomson wants to see one thing above all else from his team this season: consistency.

“Consistent level of intensity, consistent level of hard work, consistent level of teamwork, essentially. In terms of results, I don’t really have any expectations aside from staying with those daily process goals and taking it one match at a time,” Thomson said.

The Gophers’ next match will take place on Friday, when Minnesota (2-2 overall) opens its home season against No. 24 Oklahoma (3-1). Then on Sunday, Oregon (4-0) comes to town.

When the Minnesota women’s tennis team fell to Big Ten foes Illinois and Indiana last month, head coach Tyler Thomson questioned his team’s attitude. He said it would need an adjustment if they were going to make a deep postseason run.
The Gophers didn’t make that change and, as a result, his squad saw its season come to a close in the opening round of the Big Ten tournament.
“I think that the theme of the season was inconsistency,” Thomson said. “We weren’t consistent with our attitude, we weren’t consistent with our intensity and we lacked some consistency with our play in general.”

Grinder is a term often used to describe the fourth-line hockey player whose main purpose is to serve as an on-ice filler while the top-shift players rest before reclaiming their spots on the ice.
Jackie Sperling isn’t a hockey player, but through hard work and persistence, the Gophers senior women’s tennis player is wrapping up a solid four-year career in which she never received a tennis scholarship.

Losing weekends in any sport are bound to happen. The troubling aspect for the Gophers women’s tennis team is not that it was swept this weekend by Illinois and Indiana, but the lack of emotional maturity their head coach, Tyler Thomson, saw in his players.
“I think that we are capable of doing a much better job in areas that we can control, and that’s our attitude, our ability to stick around with competitiveness and our decision making,” Thomson said. “This team is very, very well intended, and I know that they give their best, but we still have a lot to learn.”

After breezing through the first few rounds, Minnesota’s Tijana Koprivica saw her tournament run come to an end at the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Central Regional this weekend in Norman, Okla.
The fifth-seeded Koprivica lost her quarterfinal match with Oklahoma’s Ana-Maria Constantinescu in three sets, 4-6, 6-2, 3-6. Constantinescu, the No. 3 seed, went on to win both the doubles and singles tournaments.