Women’s Tennis Slams Albion, Men Lose Two
by Brian Roche

Oberlin College tennis began the season proper with the men traveling to Albion, Mich. on Saturday, Feb. 16 to play both Albion College and Alma College. The women faced Albion at home on Sunday, Feb. 17.
The women’s team began the season in prime fashion with an impressive 8-1 win over Albion. Junior co-captains Alaina Fotiu-Wojtowicz and Laura Koehn led the team with wins in both their singles and doubles matches, respectively. Fotiu-Wojtowicz won the number one singles match with a score of 6-2, 3-6, 6-4, and Koehn took the number three match 6-4, 3-6, 6-2.

Head Coach Don Hunsinger said of the two, “We were absolutely thrilled that Laura Koehn has made such an improvement. It was the best match she’s ever played in her life, both singles and doubles, and her leadership and improvement out there was magnificent. We can pretty much always count on Alaina to play well, but she did a great job in doubles with her new freshman partner [Ary Amerikaner] in keeping her on track.”
Amerikaner also won her number two singles match in three sets with a score of 6-2, 5-7, 6-2. “All of our new people, I think, performed very well for being nervous and being in their first match,” Hunsinger said.

First-year Barbara Burkholder, who won her number six singles match 6-4, 6-0, expressed optimism, saying, “I think we did extremely well. Albion was supposed to be one of our harder teams and we came out on top. It was a great feeling.” The Oberlin women will look to bring their record to 2-0 when they host to Malone College this Saturday.
Men’s tennis was less successful. The Yeomen suffered a tough loss in their first match of the day against Albion. Despite a strong performance from sophomore co-captain Marian Bocek, who lost a close number one singles match with a score of 7-5, 4-6, 6-1, Oberlin fell 9-0. The second game of the day against Alma College was equally difficult, as the men saw another 9-0 result despite strong performances from Bocek and first-year Nick Ogren.
Sophomore co-captain Jamie Frankel, who, along with fellow sophomore Lawrence Kimbrough, played the first doubles matches to 8-5 and 8-4 losses against Albion and Alma, respectively, said of the weekends results, “Things didn’t go the way we wanted them to, so it was kind of upsetting to say the least, but things will turn around this weekend.”
Assistant Coach Adam Shoemaker echoed this sentiment, saying that Saturday’s matches were “a little disappointing. We were really nervous going in and that was the disappointing part. We were so nervous the guys didn’t play up to their potential, but now that we’ve been through that, I expect a little bit more out of them in the upcoming matches. They’ve all been through their first college match. But the guys have been having some good practices this week and they now know what they have to do to compete on the college level.”

The team will take this knowledge with them into this Saturday’s home match against Malone College as they look to improve their record to 1-2. Said coach Shoemaker of last weekend’s home match, “We had a great crowd at the women’s match this Sunday, and we’d like to see the same this coming Saturday.”

Both men and women will compete against Malone College on Saturday, beginning at 1 p.m. in the John Heisman Club Fieldhouse.

February 22
March 1

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