W. Tennis' No. 1 gets to finals in home state

Over the weekend the women's tennis team's top players got a special sneak preview of the Ivy League season at the Princeton Invitational. The Penn athletes who participated were singles players sophomore Anastasia Pozdniakova and junior Karen Ridley and the doubles team of junior Julia Feldman and sophomore Elana Gold. The tournament consisted of a singles draw of 32 players and a doubles draw of 16 teams. The Quakers competed individually, but their performances may provide a good indication of the team's potential for success later this year. Feldman and Gold defeated the No. 1 doubles teams from Cornell and perennial power Harvard before losing to Princeton's Kerry Patterson and Blair Farr in the semi-finals, 9-8. "It's good for our confidence to get those wins, since we will see those teams later this season," Gold said. "We were disappointed to lose, though, because we wanted to get revenge against the Penn State team in the final." The most impressive performance by a Quaker during the tournament was that of Pozdniakova. The Quakers' No.1 player reached the singles final before losing to Harvard's No. 1 player, junior Ivy Wang, 6-0, 6-3. "She played really well," Pozdniakova, the singles draw No. 2 seed, said. "I felt that I couldn't just keep the ball in play and had to go for a lot of shots." Ridley was the other Quaker to compete. She lost to Dartmouth's No. 3 player Rebecca Dirksen in the first round and entered the consolation bracket. Ridley then defeated her opponent from Columbia in the next round before having to pull out of the tournament after reaggravating an ankle injury. She does not think the injury is serious and sat out only as a precautionary measure. "It was the ankle that kept me from competing during the fall season," Ridley said. "I'm really glad I played in the tournament because it's good to see that type of competition, but it was definitely disappointing to have to pull out." The surprise team of the tournament was host school Princeton. In addition to the success of the Tigers' doubles team, which reached the final, the school's No.4 singles player reached the semi-finals before losing to Pozdniakova. "The tournament really showed how even the Ivy League teams are," Ridley said. "Almost all of the conference matches could really go either way." Recently, the top conference teams have been Brown and Harvard, and while neither school sent all of their best players, the Quakers and Tigers asserted themselves as quality competition. The Quakers will spend this week preparing for more team competition next weekend against Virginia Commonwealth and Richmond. "We are going to spend a lot of time on conditioning at the beginning of the week before tapering off before the weekend," Gold said. "We'll probably play a lot of doubles because coach always likes to concentrate on that." The Quakers can be very satisfied after a solid weekend of competition at Princeton. The time will come later this season when they will have to prove themselves against the same players once again.