October 25, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

CHC women’s tennis devours Wolves
by Tom Utescher

After slipping two notches below the .500 mark at the start of the month, Chestnut Hill College’s women’s tennis team posted its second straight shutout victory last Monday afternoon.

Blanking the visiting Cheyney University Wolves, 9-0, in an out-of-conference encounter, the Griffins leveled their overall record at 7-7. Their sixth win, a whitewash of Post University back on October 6, had given the local racquetwomen a record of 2-4 within the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference.

These figures indicate that the team has taken a big step forward since 2006, when the Griffins claimed three victories for the entire season. In the middle of the last academic year, Albert Stroble arrived at the college in the role of coach and assistant athletic director. He joined the Griffins in time to coach the men’s team last spring, but this is his first season piloting the women’s squad.

“The girls are working hard and starting to believe that they can win,” he pointed out. “There’s a willingness to change and to improve, and every day in practice they’re doing the necessary things to get better.”

As usual, doubles contests in a pro-set format were played first in last Monday’s match with Cheyney. In the top pairing, sophomore Cara Wallin and junior Karen Guwuriro of CHC were 8-1 winners over Imani Johnson and Tiffany Stanley, and in the second flight Griffin junior Landra Ginder and senior Colleen Reasoner defeated Rhea Miles and Hana Wilder, 8-2.

Freshman Sarah Doherty and senior Lisa Graeber completed the Griffins’ sweep, winning their third doubles bout, 8-1, over visitors Squatia Knight and Vernae Coleman.

In singles play, the first two Griffins to finish up were Ginder, who won in the second spot, 6-2, 6-0 over Cheyney’s Stanley, and Wallin, the CHC number one, who beat the Wolves’ Johnson, 6-1, 6-0.

“The drills the players are doing in practice have helped them,” Stroble said, “and in matches, they’re learning to find their opponent’s weakness early on, instead of just going out there with no game-plan.”

Junior Nicole Aldubayan, the hosts’ number four, put up a pair of 6-0 sets against Wilder, a Cheyney junior who came out of Bishop McDevitt High School. At number five it was CHC’s Doherty over the visitors’ Knight, 6-1, 6-1, and Chestnut Hill freshman Lauren Pescatore won in the sixth spot, 6-1, 6-0, over Coleman.

All eyes then turned to the third singles match, where the players split sets. Cheyney’s Miles won the first, 6-0, but in the second a 6-3 decision went to the Griffins’ Guwuriro, who hails from Harare, Zimbabwe.

A ten-point tiebreaker was played instead of a full third set, and after the first six points the players changed ends with the score at 3-3. Guwuriro played conservatively, but steadily, and Miles began to yield points on errors. A stroke out over the right sideline by the Cheyney junior gave Guwuriro match point at 10-5 in the breaker.

UPDATE: Later last week, CHC defeated Caldwell (NJ) College, and lost matches to Neumann College and Shippensburg University. The Griffins finished at 3-4 in the CACC and 8-9 overall, still a significant improvement over last year’s overall mark of 3-10.