Sophomore Ekaterina Kosminskaya has been as good as the Quakers could have hoped. She lost just a total of seven singles and doubles matches in the spring of her rookie campaign en route to unanimous Ivy League Rookie and Player of the Year honors.
But after missing the Quakers' first two matches of 2008 with the flu, Kosminskaya had to make her season debut against a rare opponent who has had her number.
She fell to Virginia Commonwealth's Tatsiana Uvarova, 6-0, 6-2, and the rest of her team didn't fare much better, losing 6-1.
Uvarova, a native of Minsk, Belarus, is officially a senior, but has sophomore status since she only joined the Rams last spring. Before then, she was accruing points and money on the WTA tour, earning about $39,000 and a top ranking of 232. (Kosminskaya, by comparison, earned $8,000 and peaked at 546 before coming to Penn.)
The two battled each other last year, when Kosminskaya won the first set before dropping the next two. This year, though, it was never close. Penn coach Mike Dowd said that his Russian star was "rusty," making it even more challenging for her to topple the No. 35-ranked ITA player.
The No. 23 VCU team was too much for the No. 56 Quakers to handle.
Senior captain Julia Koulbitskaya won the No. 3-singles match against Rams sophomore Olena Leonchuck - Penn's only singles victory all day.
Coach Dowd attributed Koulbitskaya's success to her experience.
"She didn't play perfect," he said, but "she wasn't nervous."
In addition to her singles victory, she and Kosminskaya clinched an 8-5 win over the doubles team of Uvarova and Viktoria Konstantinova. But the Quakers (2-1) lost the other two matches, and therefore the one point awarded the overall doubles winner.
"Our doubles match was really intense," Koulbitskaya said. "[We] fought the whole way [and had some] good points."
Good points from the Red and Blue were few and far between on Saturday. No singles player besides Koulbitskaya won as much as a set, and Yulia Rivelis' 7-6 (2) first set loss was the only one that was close. Rivelis dropped the second, 6-0.
"We were beat up pretty well," Dowd said, "and we expected a very good team."
In their previous match, the Rams had upset then-No. 9 Clemson.
And before the Quakers face the Terrapins in College Park, Md., Dowd says his team needs to "up the intensity" and "probably get a little more fit [and] match tough."
