By the numbers, the difference appears minimal: at this time last year, the Oregon women’s tennis team had ended its season with a 14-9 overall record, ranked 45th in the country. This season, the team heads to the Pacific-10 Conference Tournament in Ojai, Calif. with a 12-11 overall record, but ranked 40th in the country.
But while last season concluded with an air of hope, the aura that surrounds the team this year is one of fatigue-tinged disappointment at a promising season gone awry.
“Disappointed? Definitely. All the girls feels that way. There were matches this season which we should have won,” senior Dominika Dieskova said. “It’s even more disappointing because it’s like the second year in a row that we’ve had all those close losses against teams we should have beaten.”
Oregon started the season on a bright note, with a new head coach, two highly touted new freshmen, a roster full of sophomores coming off stellar freshman seasons, and a senior leader in Dieskova who was riding off the momentum of her best season ever. Even after they lost both freshmen, one to homesickness and one to medical problems, at the beginning of the season, all early season results seemed to indicate that the Ducks were going to be a formidable force this year.
Oregon won 10 out of its first 14 matches, and made its program debut in the Top 20 when it clinched a No. 20 ranking in March.
But with only six players and no substitutes, injuries eventually took their toll on the team, and things went downhill from there. By the end of the season, sophomore Anna Powaska was the only one who’d managed a completely injury-free year.
“Losing the two freshmen in January was probably the most difficult for me personally,” first-year Oregon coach Paul Reber said. “The lack of depth in the lineup definitely hurt us. That’s something you don’t plan for. It’s just kinda out of your hands.”
Reber tried to remedy the situation by taking on sophomore walk-on Tina Snodgrass as an insurance policy. And the policy eventually matured when Claudia Hirt sprained her ankle badly toward the end of the season, and the Ducks ended up having Snodgrass play in Hirt’s place.
“Having only six of us definitely hurt,” senior Monica Hoz de Vila said. “It’s been a success trying to actually maintain our fitness and keep ourselves healthy because we lasted ’til almost the end.
“And it put more pressure on us too, having less players. Because mentally, it was like, ‘We don’t have any backup.’”
Hail and Farewell
But the pressure made Hoz de Vila produce her best season ever. After three years of a mostly backup position, the Bolivia native finally found came into her own and put together a 20-14 season playing in the lower half of the lineup.
“It’s been my best year in all my four years of eligibility,” she said. “I guess I just took it as my fourth year, I had much more experience, I’m a senior, I just managed to be more relaxed and give it my all. Little by little, all my hard work has paid off.”
Her success on the court this year has also made Hoz de Vila re-think her plans for the future. Instead of stepping away from competitive tennis as she’d planned to do at the start of the year, Hoz de Vila now says that she’s going to try her luck on the pro circuit.
“It’s hard to quit when I don’t see any limits, you know?” said Hoz de Vila, who will represent Bolivia at the Pan-American Games this summer. “If I didn’t like it anymore I would quit. But I just have so much more than I can improve on, and I’ve been dedicated to this all my life, so it’s hard to just be done.”
It’s been a very different story for Dominika Dieskova, who began her senior season with high hopes after a breakthrough junior campaign in which she went 30-12 in singles, made it to the national tournament in both singles and doubles, and finished the year on such a good note that she was ranked 26th in this year’s preseason poll.
But this year hasn’t turned out quite the way she expected.
A preseason injury resulted in Dieskova dropping out of the rankings, and she never managed to claw her way back up.
“Last year was just an amazing year. I played solid all over,” Dieskova said. “This year there were matches that I didn’t win at the beginning of the season that were against the top players in the country, and I just came up short. I just couldn’t get on a roll like I did last year. But that’s also because I was playing a little differently.”
Under Reber’s direction, Dieskova worked all season long on trying to incorporate a fuller swing into her forehand groundstroke. It worked – to a point. But it might have cost the Ducks victory in some of their early-season matches.
In the Ducks’ 4-3 defeat to Michigan, Dieskova suffered a 7-6, 6-1 loss at the hands of 91st-ranked Jenny Kuehn. Her subsequent 6-0, 6-0 defeat to Katrina Zheltova in the Ducks’ 4-3 loss to Sacramento State marked a low point in Dieskova’s season, and she later admitted that there were times this season when she played not to win, but to experiment with her new style and try to make it work.
“I would probably have played some points differently if I could do it over again,” Dieskova said, reflecting on how the season had unfolded. “I was too focused on changing something, and I wasn’t really thinking, ‘Hey maybe you should find a smarter way to play this point.’”
But in spite of her 13-16 season record, Dieskova believes that she’s emerged as a better player overall, and she hopes to play on the pro circuit after she gets done with school next winter.
“You know, if I’d played to win instead of trying to play my new game, I don’t know if I would have learned as much from it as I’ve learned now,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to go through it to realize it. It definitely helped my forehand.
“It’s not like I have the best record ever, it’s not like I won the most matches, but it was worth it.”
Filling big shoes
With the impending departure of their No. 1 singles player, the Ducks will now have to hunt for a successor to Dieskova, who holds the school record for matches played.
“One of the greatest things about having a stud at No. 1 is that the rest of the kids you have all look up there and go, ‘Okay, we have a chance to win at the top.’ Everything kind of filters down from there,” Reber said. “You ask any coach in the country if they’re losing their No. 1 and aren’t quite sure they have somebody who can come in and step into that spot, and it’s very difficult.”
Sophomore Carmen Seremeta is a strong contender for the top spot next season. Seremeta compiled a 19-16 record this season while rotating between No. 2 and No. 3 singles, but ended the year losing eight out of nine matches.
Reber says Seremeta’s weakness lies in her lack of self-belief.
“Carmen was not super highly ranked nationally as a junior, so she’s still developing her game and still learning that she deserves to be here,” he said. “I think it’s just gonna be a matter of one or two wins coming up here in her career that are just gonna turn things around for her, where that belief factor comes in.”
Powaska, who will be the lone senior on the team next year, said the team will miss Dieskova’s presence but that they will rebound quickly regardless.
“It’s kind of similar to when Dasha left,” she said, referring to the departure of Daria Panova – the winningest player in Oregon tennis history – in 2005. “After she was gone, Dominika stepped up and had that amazing year. We’re definitely hoping to step it up next year.”
Reber is currently in the process of signing three international players whom he hopes will help fill the void left by Dieskova and Hoz de Vila next season.
One of the potential recruits is a Slovakian player who comes highly recommended by Dieskova’s former coach in Slovakia. Another possible recruit is a Belgian woman who caught the eye of Oregon Director of Tennis Nils Schyllander over the summer when Schyllander was in Bel
gium working out terms with Alex Cornelissen, who played No. 2 singles for the Duck men this year.
This added competition for roster spots from world-class talent doesn’t seem to bother the existing Ducks at all.
“Personally, if we have a rock star freshman come in who can win all the matches, I wouldn’t mind,” Seremeta said. “We had some bad luck this year, and it’s not really something we can help, but I think things are gonna get better next year.”
Both Oregon tennis teams will be competing in the Pac-10 tournament this weekend.
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