USC travels to ITA kick-off after beginning spring season with back-to-back wins
After upending both Winthrop and USC Upstate on Monday in its first action of the spring season, the South Carolina women’s tennis team will travel to Ann Arbor, Mich. Saturday for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s (ITA) kick-off weekend.
In their first competition since Nov. 4, the Gamecocks won six of seven matches against Winthrop and all four against USC Upstate to start their 2013 campaign with a 2-0 record. Against the Eagles of Winthrop, South Carolina was led by dominant doubles play from senior Jaklin Alawi and junior Dominika Kanakova.
“We needed some work after Winthrop,” coach Kevin Epley said. “I think everybody realized that, and I think everybody picked it up for the next match, and we have to use that as kind of a baseline moving forward to the next match.”
The second contest of the doubleheader was headlined by freshman Ximena Siles Luna, who was looking to recover from a heartbreaking tiebreaker loss to Winthrop’s Giovanna Portioli earlier in the day. The loss to Portioli snapped Siles Luna’s seven-game winning streak.
“After the match, I was not feeling good,” Siles Luna said. “But then I went onto the court and tried to do my best, not thinking about that match I played (earlier in the day).”
Siles Luna took a straight-set win against USC Upstate’s Allison Beller to bring her singles record to 13-3 on the season. Her 13 singles victories lead the team.
Despite the opening loss, Epley’s confidence Siles Luna was unshaken going into the second match of the day.
“She’s not the kind of player that if she loses a match, it’s going to be the end of the world for her,” Epley said. “I’m not worried about her at all in terms of the trajectory of the next month; she’s going to be fine. In two months she’s going to be playing incredible tennis.”
In Siles Luna’s first year with USC, she has lived up to the impressive resume she brought with her from her International Tennis Federation (ITF) Junior Circuit career. She won her first two ITF doubles titles in back-to-back weeks with partner Carla Forte of Brazil in El Salvador, then won at Guatemala just days later. She claimed her first singles crown over Forte in the finals of the same Guatemala tournament.
As a native of Lima, Peru, Siles Luna has played most of her career on South American soil. She says she has been forced to make adjustments to her game because of the radically different style of play between the two countries.
“Here, I have to be alert to every ball,” Siles Luna said. “It’s quicker here.”
Aside from the speed and style of the game, Siles Luna said that everything from the type of court to where the matches are played is different in the neighboring continents. She played most of her previous matches indoors on clay courts.
The freshman continues to develop her game on and off the court. She knows that protecting her 13-3 singles mark will become a more daunting task once national play gets underway.
“I need to work on a lot of things in my game,” Siles Luna said. “I need to improve a lot in my conditioning. I mean, I’m just starting and it’s going to be a lot of work.”
South Carolina will get its ITA season underway in its first of two meetings with the Missouri Tigers this season. Play will start at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday in Ann Arbor and, depending on the result of the contest, USC will play either Brown or Michigan on Sunday.
In Epley’s first season as head coach, he said he is continuing to work on the basics as the spring season progresses.
“We’re still working on the concepts of energy and professionalism and who we are as a team,” Epley said. “Stuff that we’ve been working on since the beginning and it’s still not a habit yet.”