One down, a full season to go.
Action returned to the Student Tennis Center on Friday afternoon when Oregon women’s tennis opened up the 2024 spring season the same way it began its fall season: against Portland State University.
“It’s great to be back and it is always good to get our first match in at home,” said Courtney Nagle, the Ducks’ sixth-year head coach. “We’re excited for the season to begin and the girls are ready to go.”
To start the day, Oregon secured the doubles point in a tiebreak on court three, with Karin Young and Tennessee transfer Olivia Symons surviving PSU’s Scarlett Perkins and Elizabeth Strongina, 7-6 (7-1).
The Ducks’ No. 1 doubles pair Sophie Luescher and Uxia Martinez-Moral settled back into speed quickly — winning 6-0 against Capu Sanoner and Nika Beukers in about 20 minutes. Despite establishing herself as the best doubles player in PSU program history, Sanoner was unable to respond to the composed skill of the Ducks.
Last season, Luescher and Martinez-Moral reached a doubles ranking as high as No. 77. The duo said it will look to reclaim its impressive ranking as the spring season progresses.
On court two, Jo-Yee Chan and Nina Geissler fell short to the Vikings’ Makoto Ohara and Momoko Yoshimura, 4-6. Geissler contributed great groundstroke exchanges from the baseline, but ultimately the tandem had trouble constructing the point they wanted. The duo, whose doubles record from the fall was 2-3, appeared to be working through some first-match nerves in their relatively new partnership.
“One thing we’ve said as a team is that no matter the outcome of the doubles matches, we just need to start fresh, reset and take singles as a separately new thing,” Geissler said.
And that’s actually what the LSU graduate student transfer did. Just seconds after Martinez-Moral clinched the match in singles for the Ducks, Geissler secured her first Oregon singles victory of the regular season, 6-2, 6-4. Geissler, who is from Rorschach, Switzerland, traded breaks multiple times in the second set with PSU’s Beukers but managed to hold serve in the final game to win the match.
Her partner, Chan, was similarly successful in singles and concluded the day with a third-set tiebreak, outlasting Yoshimura, 7-5, 3-6 (10-7).
At No. 3 singles, Symons also came through victorious in a third-set, 10-point tiebreaker over Sanoner, 6-3, 5-7 (10-1). The redshirt sophomore stuck to swinging through her forehand to come back from being down 3-5 in the second set.
Earlier on court six, in standard Young fashion, the Oregon junior blanked her opponent, Perkins, with ease and composed class.
At the opposite end of the lineup, in the No. 1 singles spot, Luescher sealed a 6-3, 6-1, win over Strongina. Following a tight first set, Luescher adopted an aggressive approach to combat the sturdy sophomore from Russia. Strongina is among one of the five returners from PSU’s 2023 team that narrowly missed the Big Sky Championship match last season.
“I think we have a very motivated team and everyone has the same goals,” Geissler said. “I am very excited for this spring and to see how we compete throughout the season.”
Nagle agreed and said she’s eager to keep building the chemistry within the team, both on and off the court.
The Ducks will have one week to work out some of their first-match kinks before flying east to Chapel Hill, N.C., for the ITA Kickoff Weekend. UO will face host and defending national champion North Carolina on Jan. 27 before competing against either Charlotte or Kentucky the following day.
“It’s going to be great to face a challenge, a big challenge, with UNC — the No. 1 team in the country — and see where we stack up,” said Nagle, who served as UNC’s top assistant coach for four seasons prior to arriving in Eugene. “We will give them our best shot.”
