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Roadrunners rout cowering Cougars
Tennis team sweeps Colorado Christian in 17 or 18 matches
By Eric Lansing
lansing@mscd.edu

Photo by Heather A. Longway-Burke • longway@mscd.edu Metro tennis player Mitra Hirad jumps for a return shot in her singles match April 9 at Auraria Courts.

Some of Metro’s tennis players were standing around after their matches and joking about World Wrestling Entertainment moves and which ones work the best. On April 9, the Roadrunners used a full body slam to crush Colorado Christian 9-0 in men’s action and 8-1 in women’s at Auraria Courts.

But Metro tennis head coach Dave Alden played down the conference blowout and spoke of it as a must-win.

“This was a match we needed to win, and they performed up to their capabilities,” Alden said. “Sometimes when you are (favored) in a match, it’s easy to let your focus down and not to play up to your capabilities. They played intense and they played well.”

The matches began with doubles competition as Sascha Ruckelshausen and Riley Meyer quickly defeated the Cougars’ Kevin Angel and Ryan MacLeod 8-0. Metro’s Drew Machholz and Mark Milner also made quick work of their opponents as they won 8-0 over the Cougars’ Nathan Woodring and Taylor Shade.

“We all played pretty good today,” Machholz said. “We had some high expectations. This is one of the weaker teams in the conference.”

What did the coach tell his team before playing the weaker Colorado Christian squad?

“No freebies,” Machholz said. “No free points.”

The men’s third doubles match was not played because Colorado Christian only had five male players, so David Scott and Sean Carlton won by default.

On the women’s side, they won all three of their doubles matches, rebounding from a 3-0 sweep by Nebraska-Kearney a week ago.

Mitra Hirad and April Hirad led the way for the women as they defeated the Cougars’ Amy Fager and Cali Friesen 8-1 in second of the three matches. Metro’s Alecia Jenkins and Miriam Evangelista won 8-2, while Orzalla Nabiyar and Katie Reitz squeezed out an 8-6 victory in the final doubles match.

In singles competition, Metro won 11 of the 12 matches as the men won 6-0, including a default win for Scott, and the women won 5-1 with the only blemish coming from Reitz, who fell to Ashley Sonnenberg 9-7 in what was the best match of the competition. The two battled back and forth, exchanging points as their teammates huddled around to cheer on the last competitors. Sonnenberg took the match, and Reitz left before the team huddle because it was, as the coach said, a match she needed to win.

It was the women’s second victory of the season as they have struggled in nonconference play. The women’s team has played a difficult nonconference schedule, playing opponents such as No. 1 Brigham Young University, No. 5 University of West Florida and No. 16 Hawaii Pacific University.

Alden said that although he schedules the opponents an entire year earlier, he knows that those teams are going to be good, and it gives his team a taste of how top-rated tennis is played.

“We have the ability to experience a higher level of tennis by playing those teams than (the teams) we see in our conference,” Alden said. “So it prepares us pretty well. We have such a young team on our women’s side that they have to get match play experience, and they have to see tennis at its highest level. It will give them something to strive for.”

Four of the five men competing won their singles matches 6-0, 6-0 with the fifth man, Ruckelshausen, winning 6-4, 6-1.

Ruckelshausen struggled at the beginning of his match, committing a few unforced errors that had the highly animated player talking to himself and swinging his racket in frustration. During the first set, Alden went out on the court and talked with his irritated athlete.

“I think his focus wasn’t there, and he wasn’t playing to his capabilities,” Alden said. “I just recentered him and told him to make sure that he was really making the shots he should of made.”

The men’s victory improved their record to 11-7 with a 2-1 record in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. The women’s victory pushes their record to 2-20 and a 1-2 record in conference play. Both teams will take on Western New Mexico April 13 at Auraria Courts.

“Even in the conference tournament, I truly believe that we have the ability on our team to beat anyone in the conference,” Alden said.