The Aplington-Parkersburg girls tennis team cruised to a 9-0 win at Oelwein to begin the season Monday. The Falcons were dominant, giving up one or fewer games in six of the matches. Three matches resulted in 8-0 sweeps, including Holly Haugstad at #3 singles, Kate Livingood at #4 singles and Jayden Krausman/Megan Bruns at #1 doubles.
After the graduation of three players who qualified for last year’s individual state tournament, three singles players have slid up in the lineup, including Krausman, Bruns and Haugstad. Head Coach Haley Schneiderman says getting the players in the three other spots up to speed will be a crucial factor.
“For them, it’s going to be lot of figuring out placement-wise where we should place the ball to win points,” Schneiderman says. “And big across the board this year, I really want to push doubles, just being more aggressive at the net, different things like that, so we can pick up some more doubles wins too. I think that’ll help us.”
They’ll take on Dike-New Hartford and Columbus Catholic in a double dual Tuesday at Byrnes Park. Schneiderman says it’ll be one of the biggest meets of the season.
“The first two weeks, I feel like most of our meets are jam-packed, which is good and bad. Obviously they just keep playing and playing and playing, but then we haven’t had a lot of practice days to work on some of the things that I would like to work on with them. I was trying to coach them through the Oelwein meet, preparing them for two pretty solid teams, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. We have some really great competition here right away this first week, which I hope will then set us up for the rest of the season.”
The Falcons will take on the Wolverines at 9:00 a.m., simultaneous with Grundy Center taking on the hosts. At 1:00, AP will play Columbus and Dike-New New Hartford will face Grundy Center.
Haley Schneiderman interview:
