Stanford Women’s Tennis ends season in 2nd round of NCAA tournament
Over the weekend, No. 30 Stanford women’s tennis fell to No. 11 Pepperdine 4-0 in the second round of the NCAA tournament after defeating No. 38 BYU 4-2 in the first round. Pepperdine got the home court advantage for the weekend as the matches were played in Malibu, California.
BOX SCORE: Stanford vs. BYU-Friday, May 1st
BOX SCORE: Stanford at Pepperdine-Saturday, May 2nd
In the win over BYU, Stanford lost the doubles point before bouncing back in the singles as Monika Ekstrand, Alyssa Ahn, Tianmei Wang, and Caroline Driscoll all won their matches. It was a classic problem for Stanford of having to come back after dropping the doubles point and in the end, that really hurt them against Pepperdine, though the Waves across the board were the much better team. Still, losing that doubles point always makes things tougher.
While this season didn’t go the way Stanford wanted it to go, there are some positives they can take from this season. Ahn, Wang, and Ekstrand are all freshmen who got valuable experience this season and that is something that should pay dividends for the program in the coming seasons.
The other factor is their star players, projected No. 1 and No. 2 singles players Alexis Blokhina and Valerie Glozman were both out for the majority of the season. Blokhina never played a match due to injury while Glozman only played seven singles matches. With those two players out, it was really hard for head coach Frankie Brennan to get his team to achieve the same goals they had before those players got injured. Assuming both Blokhina and Glozman make a full recovery and are a full go for next season, next year’s team should really benefit from the growth they had to undergo this year with them being out.
Overall, the future appears to be bright for this Stanford team. They’ll have a talented sophomore group that grew a lot from this year and a strong one-two punch in Blokhina and Glozman. Plus, a couple of talented freshmen are coming in as well in Kaia Giribalan out of Los Altos, California and 5-star Blue Chip Katerina Shabashkevich out of Boca Raton, Florida. It’ll be fun to see how next season goes for the Cardinal and how much they grow from what they had to go through this season.
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