It’s mid-October, but this weekend will feel like spring for the LSU women’s tennis team.
The Lady Tigers will see their first Southeastern Conference competition of the fall season when they hit the courts today in Auburn, Ala. for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Southern Regional Championships.
The five SEC teams set to compete at Auburn University’s Yarbrough Tennis Center resemble LSU’s schedule of opponents in spring 2014.
While the Lady Tigers haven’t played competitive tennis since September, LSU coach Julia Sell said the team is eager to put its sustained practice time into action.
“It’s been a really good two weeks,” Sell said. “We’re actually just kind of ready to play again. We played an event, we came home, we worked on some stuff and I think now we’re itching again to play a tournament.”
The Lady Tigers will shift from rehearsal to a high-level, five-day event which includes some of the top talent from around the Southern region. Among the tournament’s draw, nine singles players rank inside the top-100, led by host Auburn’s No. 18 Pleun Burgmans, and three doubles teams exceed the No. 25 spot of the women’s ITA rankings.
Team scores will not be calculated in the contest. However, winners of the tournament from both the singles and doubles draws are awarded a wild card into the National Indoor Championships among the nation’s top 32 women.
LSU will have all seven of its players in the event that serves as the first assessment of the Lady Tigers’ potential come springtime.
“If you do have your stuff together in the fall, if you are playing some of your better tennis, you get invited to a lot of different events,” Sell said. “It helps get your ranking higher which gets you in to All-Americans and sets you up really for NCAAs. … So if they can go to Regionals and do well, it helps them individually from a standpoint of just what they’ll qualify for.”
Wednesday afternoon, the Lady Tigers rallied with the coaching staff, ran sprint drills from the net to the service line and perfected their swing mechanics.
While the spring is a time when team finishes truly matter, individual development from week to week is Sell’s primary concern in the fall.
LSU can afford to make adjustments in its game now, whereas the spring calendar, marked with matches every week, doesn’t provide as much room for training.
To get to the point of winning after January, Sell said the Lady Tigers must continue to work hard in the coming months and just appreciate playing tennis.
“I’m not a big results-oriented coach,” Sell said. “In the fall and kind of something we preach to our players is, ‘This is your time to work on stuff and not worry about results and figure it all out, and just play and enjoy it.’ … I just want to see them keep competing hard and working hard and doing the things we’re doing in practice because if they do that, the wins will come.”