For the first time in more than a year, the No. 11 UCLA women’s tennis team dropped two matches in a row, losing to No. 4 Baylor on Tuesday afternoon after being upset 4-3 on Sunday by No. 13 Arizona State.
The Bruins (8-3) got off to a solid start in doubles action, sweeping all three matches to take a 1-0 lead, but from there, the Bears quickly turned things around.
“I was happy with the way we started in that doubles point,” UCLA coach Stella Sampras Webster said.
But the happiness quickly wore away as Baylor began to win set after set, and then match after match, winning four straight singles to seal the dual match and improve to 9-1 on the season.
The Bears quickly jumped ahead on the top two courts and at No. 4 and No. 6 singles and didn’t look back, maintaining poise after giving up the opening point of the match, which had been postponed from its initial set date.
The postponement seemed to work in Baylor’s favor, as the Bruins were without two of their top six players, senior Alex McGoodwin and sophomore Yasmin Schnack.
As in Arizona, when the Bruins lost 4-3 to the Sun Devils, senior Tracy Lin’s match at court No. 2 clinched the win for the opposition.
In a trend that has become apparent through the course of the season, the team seems to fare as Lin does.
All three of the Bruins’ losses on the season have come when she has lost her singles match, with the two most recent being decided by her match.
“We just didn’t play well enough to win those key matches,” Sampras Webster said. “We had some close sets and stuff, but they were just more disciplined and better.”
The schedule for the Bruins won’t get any easier as the week progresses, however, as they will play host to No. 6 Stanford on Friday afternoon and No. 8 California on Saturday.
For now, though, Sampras Webster and her Bruin squad won’t be depending solely on the return of the injured McGoodwin and Schnack, whose injuries she said were day-to-day, but will rather look to make improvements with the players they have available as of now.
“We don’t want to look at it really, but it’d obviously make things easier,” Sampras Webster said. “What we have to do, though, is look at ourselves and get better because we don’t know when they’ll be back.
“We have to believe we can win every match.”
MEN’S TENNIS: The No. 6 men’s tennis team will finally take the courts again after being forced off the courts over the weekend because of rainy weather. They were scheduled to take on Arizona.
The Bruins (7-1) will play their only match of the week against UC Santa Barbara this afternoon before heading to La Jolla to compete in the Pacific Coast Doubles Championships, a noncollegiate event that won’t count toward the doubles records on the season.
Starting March 5, however, things will get interesting again, as the Bruins look to continue their hot streak against No. 24 Rice before taking on No. 7 USC, No. 9 Baylor and No. 10 Duke, all within a one-week stretch.