Both the Oberlin men’s and women’s tennis teams enjoyed victories last Saturday against Otterbein College from Westerville, Ohio. The men picked up their first win of the season while the women remained unbeaten at 3-0.
In another close match, the Oberlin men improved their season record to 1-3 as they slipped past their opponents by a score of 4-3. The Yeomen put in a bottom heavy performance this week with important wins coming from first-years Nick Ogren and Ananya Balaram, junior Matt Fairbanks and sophomore Brad White in the last four singles positions. Also, the doubles pair of first-year Mark Knee and Balaram won their number three match with a respectable 6-2, 7-5.
Coach Don Hunsinger said of the match, “Well, it’s a good start. I think the week before we were very close to winning. It was a good win because it was competitive and close, and it came down to the last match. It was really nice, and I think the nice thing about it was the fact that tennis is a team sport in college, and we didn’t do well at the top like we did the week before. This week we did well at the bottom, so people picked up the slack, and, really, with [sophomore] Jay [Frankel] not playing, everbody has to move up of course, and everybody really picked up their load and did a great job. I thought everybody played well. Our doubles played better, and they were good competitive matches, and the effort was very good. And in singles, I think Ananya was in a tough spot getting into the singles for the first time and played very well. Nick had a great match in singles. And I think everybody really pulled their load and it was clearly a team effort.”
Knee added to this, saying, “We did well. I was a little disappointed with my singles outcome but me and Ananya finally pulled out a match, and the team won, so it feels good.”
Coach Hunsinger expressed optimism about the rest of the men’s season, saying, “The rest of the season is tough to tell. We have some matches in the next couple of weeks that we think that we can do well in. And we’re playing some tough teams, but we’ll see if we can keep progressing.”

The women also picked up a win with the familiar score of 8-1, bringing their record to 3-0. Junior co-captains Alaina Fotiu-Wojtowicz and Laura Koehn led the team with wins of 6-1, 6-1 and 6-2, 6-3 in the number one and number three matches, respectively. First-years Jess Hauser and Barbara Burkholder, as well as sophomore Whitney Reicheld, also put in good performances, winning the fourth, fifth and sixth single matches by scores of 6-2, 6-1; 6-1, 6-1 and 6-0, 6-1 respectively.
Ary Amerikaner, who won her number two singles match with the scores 6-2, 7-5, said of the match, “We played really well, especially in singles. In doubles we had a little bit of trouble, but not bad. And hopefully we can build on it because this [Saturday’s] match is going to be a tough one. It’s one of the biggest ones of the season.”
The women will host Hope College on Saturday at 1 p.m., while the men are off.