By Nicholas Moreano
The undefeated Iowa women’s tennis team will try to keep the streak going when it plays host to Evansville at 10 a.m. and Western Illinois at 1 p.m. on Saturday in the Hawkeye Tennis & Recreation Complex.
The Hawkeyes will be without head coach Sasha Schmid until Thursday. She is currently on a recruiting trip in Chicago and wanted to visit the recruits before they came on their visits. Stepping up in her absence is assistant coach Drew Lied.
Even though Lied will be leading practice, the routine will stay the same. The Hawkeyes had a meeting at the beginning of the week, going over what they need to work on.
This weekend’s matchup is the Hawkeyes’ third two-fer in the past four weeks. The Hawkeyes have played a lot of tennis and have remained unbeaten, but Lied wants the team to remain focused and continue to strive to be better.
“Basically, just know that it’s a process of getting better every single time you get onto the court,” Lied said. “Making it a habit so it doesn’t really matter who you play but building the good habits day in and day out.”
On Feb. 18, the Hawkeyes’ match against Texas-Arlington was canceled because of adverse weather. Even though the team was looking forward to the matchup, senior Aimee Tarun still believes her teammates benefited from having the weekend off.
“We all would have liked to have that match,” Tarun said. “But we got the weekend off, so we got to rest, and we are going really hard this week since we have had two days off.”
Hopefully, the Hawkeyes did get well-rested because they have to be up bright and early on Saturday for their match against the Purple Aces, which will be the first time the two schools have faced each other.
Despite the early start, sophomore Carin Runefelt thinks that the team will benefit from it because the day won’t seem as long, like the Iowa State and Montana matches on Feb. 5 that started at 3 p.m. and didn’t end until close to 9 p.m.
“I think that most people would prefer that rather than the late-night one we had the other weekend,” Runefelt said. “It just made the whole day seem so much longer, so if you start at 10, you get done earlier, which is a better thing.
In the afternoon matchup against the Leathernecks, the Hawkeyes are 10-0 in the all-time series. The last time the two schools faced each other was in the 2012-13 season in Iowa City; the Hawkeyes won, 7-0.
Both the Purple Aces and Leathernecks are 1-3 on the road this season, and the Hawkeyes will try to use home-court advantage to obtain their eighth- and ninth-straight victories. If the Hawkeyes can do that, it will be their second best start in school history. The Hawkeyes’ best start came in the 1989-90 season, when the team started 12-0.
