After an up-and-down few months, the women's tennis team was finally able to get a winning streak going.
Penn amassed its first three-game winning streak -- or three-game streak of either kind -- since February by beating Cornell and Columbia last weekend, a week after winning at Dartmouth.
Saturday, the Quakers left Ithaca, N.Y., with a 6-1 victory and came home to face Columbia, which they disposed of by the score of, 5-2. With the victories, Penn will finish in second place in the Ivy League standings, behind Harvard, which stands at 6-0.
Against Columbia (8-6, 3-4 Ivy), the Quakers (11-6, 5-2) were dominant -- that is, after the top two spots.
Penn swept the three matches to take the doubles point, but Columbia's top two knocked off freshmen Yulia Rivelis and Julia Koulbitskaya.
Luckily for the Quakers, the rest of their ladder, including seniors Shelah Chao and Kate Williams, who were playing their last matches with the team, responded in a big way.
Michelle Mitchell, Chao, Caroline Stanislawski and Williams breezed past their opponents, with only Mitchell needing a third set, to defeat the Lions.
The previous afternoon had some close calls, but the Quakers prevailed in many of the tight ones to beat the last-place Big Red (9-9, 1-6).
Among the closest matches of the day was Stanislawski's victory at No. 5 singles. The junior dropped the first set, 6-3, before coming back to win the second, 6-1. Stanislawski would ultimately top Cornell's Nisha Suda by winning 10-7 in third-set tiebreaker.
Combining the two wins with the victory over Dartmouth gives the Quakers their first three-game winning streak since victories the first two weeks of February, and the the team will look to continue its streak on opening day 2006.
