W. Tennis loses two in South

This weekend, the Penn women's tennis team headed south to play Georgia Tech and Clemson, two nationally ranked teams the Quakers had never played before. And even though the Red and Blue lost both matches, this weekend gave them an early taste of the competition they will face from the elite teams in the Ivy League. Penn's first disappointment of the weekend was a 9-0 loss to No. 49 Georgia Tech on Saturday. "We got shellacked," Penn senior captain Elana Gold said. "It snowballed in a bad way. It wasn't a pleasant experience." While five of the Quakers' singles matches were lost in two straight sets, Penn sophomore Jolene Sloat won her first set 6-2 before the Yellow Jackets' Jamie Wong fought back and captured the next two sets 6-1, 6-0. Sloat believes that the first Quakers' loss of the match was contagious. "If I'm playing a match and my teammate on the next court is doing well, I'll step it up and I'll play better," she said. "If they're losing, it's not going to have a positive effect on me." Like Sloat's three-setter, the doubles battle between the Georgia Tech pair of Sabrina Pardo and Bobbi Guthrie and the Penn team of Lenka Beranova and Rochelle Raiss was tightly contested until the end, when the Yellow Jackets edged them, 8-6. Penn junior Shubha Srinivasan believes, quite simply, that the entire team had a bad day. "We lost intensity as a team," she said. "Usually some people have a bad day and others pull it off." Srinivasan and Sloat believe the Quakers' post-match talk ended up helping them prepare for their match against Clemson. The Quakers reflected on what was good about individual matches before discussing what needed improvement. Sunday's match with Clemson started off on the wrong foot. Because of rain, the match was moved to an indoor facility -- half of whose courts were taken up by an ongoing men's tournament -- and started an hour and a half late. "We only had four courts, and it was really disorganized," Srinivasan said. "[The setup] was not very professional, and it kind of upset our team. But it's not an excuse." After losing her first set, 6-3, to the Tigers' Anna Savitskaya, Penn senior Anastasia Pozdniakova pulled through and won her next two sets 6-2, 7-5. "She played an excellent match," Gold said of her teammate. "She inspired us all." Srinivasan and Sloat teamed up for doubles and won their match, 8-1, bringing the Quakers their second and final point of the day. Penn's final losing score of 5-2 is misleading. Because court availability caused delays, Gold and Sloat -- playing Nos. 5 and 6 singles, respectively -- were winning their matches when they were forced to leave them unfinished so the Quakers could catch their plane back to Philadelphia. "We learned how to handle adversity and keep our heads high," Penn coach Michael Dowd said. "We can't let one point, one game, one set put us back. We have to look at the big picture." Dowd believes Georgia Tech and Clemson are roughly at the same level of competition that the Quakers will face against Ivy powerhouses Princeton and Harvard later in the season. "The team is getting consistently stronger," he said. "It's coming down to crunch time, and it's time to get the missing pieces and put it together. You have to be exposed to a high level of competition to get better, and we'll get better very quickly."

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