Despite injury, illness and inexperience, the Washburn tennis teams have gotten off to a solid start this season.

After a 7-2 win for the men’s team and a 9-0 win for the women’s team over the University of Nebraska-Kearney two weeks ago, the teams have played well in both singles and doubles matches since then.

The men’s team played back-to-back matches this past weekend and proved to be strong competitors despite missing ill and injured players. On Friday, the team finished 4-3 against Southeastern Oklahoma State University, but with two players missing from the competition, they had to give up two points to Southeastern, resulting in a 5-4 loss.

Saturday’s match against Newman University gave the men’s team its second victory of the season with a solid 7-2 win over the Jets. Coach Dave Alden was happy with the team’s overall performance and hopes to see the success continue throughout the season.

“Once our guys get back from injury and sickness, we’ll continue to get stronger,” said Alden.

Although the women’s team has had little experience playing tennis at the college level, they’ve shown no signs of weakness thus far as they finished 9-0 over Newman on Saturday, giving them a perfect record in both singles and doubles matches so far this season.

“We’ve been doing really well so far,” said Trang Le Nguyen, junior. “We did a really good job the first game, and for the second game, it gave everyone a lot of confidence, so we played well.”

The men’s and women’s teams will play Barton County Community College on Wednesday, and Alden hopes that the competition will give them the chance to shake off some of their first match jitters.

“Barton County is always pretty tough,” said Alden. “This really is a great opportunity for us to go out and get the teams to gel a little more, especially from the doubles standpoint.”

Overall, Alden is pleased with the way his teams have competed so far this season, but he still sees room for improvement.

“We’re good from a practice standpoint,” he said. “We just need to continue to get the match play in so we can get match tough.”