The flooding in Yale’s indoor courts on Saturday forced the women’s tennis team to take their game outside. But it did not stop the Bulldogs from winning their home invitational.
The Bulldogs won three out of four singles and one out of two doubles to win the two-day tournament that featured three other schools — Quinnipiac, Stony Brook and Syracuse.
“Overall, I am very pleased with the team’s performance,” Yale head coach Chad Skorupka said. “A tournament like this is really good for us because it toughens the players up as a team. We played a long day of tennis [on Saturday], and we will probably end up playing two long days of tennis next weekend at Rice. So this week is getting us ready for next week.”
In the A Flight singles category, Reshmi Srinath ’04 dominated all three of her matches to clinch the singles title for Yale. Srinath defeated Quinnipiac’s Tina Hoang in the first round, 6-0, 6-1, and cruised past Syracuse’s Ashley Lipton in the semis on Saturday, 6-0, 6-0, to win a ticket to the finals. Srinath downed Stony Brook’s Hanna Chovanova in straight sets, 6-1, 6-4, to take the singles title.
“I am pretty happy with all the games that I played,” Srinath said. “The tournaments in the fall are important in the sense that our individual match records at these tournaments count towards the qualifying for the ITA East Regional tournament at the end of October.”
Srinath got 11 wins for Yale last season at the No. 3 spot and was selected to the All-Ivy second team for singles. She was ranked 28th at the East Regional and is hoping to do even better in her final year as a Bulldog.
In the B Flight singles, Rashmee Patil ’07 also cruised to the finals with a 6-1, 6-1 win over Quinnipiac’s Johanna Dorsey and a 6-1, 6-0 victory against Stony Brook’s Katie Bramante on Saturday. But Patil lost her final match against Syracuse’s Victoria Vaynberg in two sets, 6-3, 6-3, to settle for second place.
“I was a little disappointed with the singles final,” Patil said. “But I was happy with the way I played in the last two days.”
But Patil made up for her singles loss in her doubles match, where she and partner Aimee Kim ’07 came up victorious over Stony Brook 8-3 on Sunday in the A Flight doubles final. Kim also won the C Flight singles, edging her own teammate Olivia Nix ’07 in a close match, 7-5, 6-3.
In the B Flight doubles category, Srinath and Juliette Vartikar ’06 lost 8-5 to Syracuse’s Katie Bramante and Wei Ming Leong.
The D Flight singles category also featured an all-Bulldog final. Rookies Lindsey Dashiell ’08 and Catherine Starr ’08 both advanced to the final comfortably in their first-ever tournament for Yale and had to face each other on the court on Sunday’s final. Starr came out on top with a close 6-4, 7-5 win.
After a successful start to the new year, the Bulldogs will next travel to Houston, Texas, for the Rice Tennis Classic on Thursday for the three-day invitational tournament hosted by Rice University.
“It is going to be hot at Texas”, Srinath said.