This past weekend, both the men’s and women’s tennis teams took the court at the Binghamton Invite and the West Point Invitational, respectively. The men’s team posted two victories in doubles with junior Alec Dardis and first-year Jack Ablon winning the White Flight, while first-year Peter Hartman teamed up with sophomore Kun Tan to win the Black Flight. 

Two other doubles teams, made up of junior Noah Rosenblat and first-year Tyler Krantz, and senior Jacob Daugherty along with first-year Scott Bickel finished third and fourth respectively in the Green Flight for doubles. In singles, Bickel made it to the finals of the Green singles bracket by pulling off back-to-back upset wins against NJIT’s Tomi Antoljak and Jan Cimrman, while Daugherty, Dardis and Krantz won their consolation brackets. 

For the women’s team, junior Lauren Hyland continued her winning ways by reaching the quarterfinals of the Flight A Singles bracket. 

“We’ve had an amazing start to the fall. In our first invite we went undefeated and our second one we had some solid wins. The key to success for me would be to continue to train hard and stay motivated. Tennis can be a difficult sport because although our real season is in the spring we play a lot of invitationals in the fall. In addition, although tennis can appear to be a very individualized sport on the surface teamwork is an important aspect. If we are cheering each other on and pushing each other to go further and work harder I believe that will allow me to play better and ultimately allow us to have an amazing spring season,” Hyland said.

Hyland also made strides in the doubles tournament partnering with sophomore Jordan Williams to make a run to the consolation bracket finals after taking a tough opening round loss. Unfortunately, the duo fell to Lehigh’s Christina Auyeung and Casey Zhong. First-year Mackenzie Deeter also continued to show promise as she won her opening match in Flight A singles before falling in the second round. In Flight B, Williams advanced to the second round while sophomore Lauren O’Brien got a win in the consolation bracket.

“We have a long break from now until we play our last invitational at Lehigh. It is important for us to not let off the gas and continue to work hard. During the fall we focus a great deal on off court training. Lift is an important part as well as cross training that includes footwork drills and sprints. Hopefully during these next couple weeks we can continue to improve our games as well as our fitness. In order to continue our success we must work together to motivate each other to achieve new heights. We have excellent team chemistry which helped us last spring and hopefully will help us again this year. We must also look back on our first two invites and try to improve things that we felt were weaknesses during our matches,” Hyland said.

The men’s team returns to action next weekend at Brown University to compete in the Brown Invite, while the women’s team travels to Bethlehem, P.A. for the Patriot League Kickoff on October 13.

Contact Gideon Hamot at ghamot@colgate.edu.