FALL PREVIEW: Park Hill South Girls Tennis

Coming off conference and district titles in 2011, the Park Hill South girls tennis team returns in 2012 with five of their six varsity starters from a year ago including doubles state qualifiers senior Marie Gehrke and sophomore Adele Royle. Coaches Glynis Chambers and Ian Cunliff believe they have a team that can build off the strong foundation last year’s success brought..

“We’ve got a lot of younger depth that we didn’t have last year,” Cunliff said.

With one more year’s experience under their belt, a talented group of young players become a strength for the Panthers. While the makings of a successful season are there for South in 2012, they believe one key factor that gives them an advantage this year over last is something that can’t be measured by the scoreboard.

“Maturity (last year), it wasn’t really anything on the court. A lot of it was just mental.”

In a sport which is almost exclusively individual in the offseason, players are required to practice on their own.

“They’ve all been working on things,” Cunliff said. “I gave them a ‘wish list’ of things to work on over the summer.”

Park Hill South will lean heavily on their top two in Royle and Gehrke, who established themselves as dominant forces in Northland tennis last year both individually and as a pair. The two advanced to the state tournament before falling in a close 2-1 loss in the sectional round.

“Marie is very consistent and steady; Adele is a big hitter and goes for a lot of hard shots. She hits a lot of winners,” Chambers said. “They went to state in doubles last year. We’ll just have to see what their success is like at the end of the season on whether they will do singles or doubles.”

More experience and skills on the players’ end mean the coaching staff can implement more effective strategies to win on their end.

“Since there are nine matches going on in one dual, it’s not like we focus on one unit. In tennis, we kind of know the main players and how our players should play them, but we also have a generic game plan as well. It’s up to us coaches to modify that for each of the nine matches,” Cunliff said. “The better our players are, the more detailed we can get as coaches.”