Women's Tennis Season Preview
Tuesday January 30, 2024 - 5:45 p.m. | Dylan DeVlieger
The MCC Women's Tennis team kicks off their 2024 season on Feb. 18 as they host Utah Tech in a non-conference match.
The Lady T-Birds are coming off a 5-7 record (2-3 ACCAC) last season where they took second in the region and 23rd in the NJCAA National Championship.
With a younger team this season head coach Feroz Rast looks to his three returners to lead the five freshmen on the roster with the experience they gained from last season.
"I'm looking for them to lead from the front, they won't be our top players on the team but what the sophomores have that the others don't is experience."
One of those sophomores he looks to step up and become a leader is sophomore Kirsten Nielson who grew a lot during her freshman year at MCC. Learning valuable lessons along the way last year, Neilson is eager to help her teammates learn to not stick to their losses and learn when to move on from their shortcomings.
"It's really important to learn from your losses, I think people get really stuck on their faults in tennis and just get hyper focused on that," said Neilson, "so this year I will work on and help the team work on is just moving on to the next point and learning from it, but not staying focused on it."
Two freshmen that Nielson will help lead during the season are Mikaela Correa and Jackelin Almada Lopez. Lopez and Correa are two players to look out for this season according to Rast, who was very encouraged by their play during the fall.
"They're our two aces if I was talking baseball terms. Both of them had big wins against Arizona Christian and Jessup in the fall, I think they're going to just keep improving and getting big wins," said Rast.
Before the Lady T-Birds get into conference play they will have the tall task of taking on some very talented teams as they will host Utah Tech and Seward County Community College.
Rast loves to have his teams match up with the best of the best to start the season to test their ability to keep their heads up even when things might not be going their way. Rast knows that iron sharpens iron and the only way to get better is to take on higher level programs.
"We want to play the best of the best, I know sometimes you'll take some big punches but the biggest thing from my team is to not fall down and if we do fall down to take that knockout punch and get back up," said Rast.
With a tough stretch to begin the season Rast knows his team may struggle with handling defeat and will count on his sophomores to help his inexperienced players keep their heads up and move on to the next match.
"Keeping our morale up, that's really where our sophomores come into play with their energy," said Rast, "that's one thing that they never faltered at last year was after our tough losses they came back the next day ready to work harder."
Mesa will work towards their goals of capturing the conference championship, a piece of hardware that has eluded the team since 2019 as they came in third in 2021, and second in 2022 and 2023. In 2022 MCC fell to Eastern Arizona College 5-4 in the conference championship.
MCC will begin conference play on the road against Paradise Valley Community College on Feb. 27. They will wrap up their regular season on April 20 against GCU Club.
Click here to view the Lady T-Birds schedule.
