Shorewood High School’s girls’ tennis team finished their 2022 season strong, with a junior varsity win in the Woodland Conference, as well Misa Herrings, freshman, qualifying in singles, and Courtney Davis, junior, and Ruby Donner, senior, qualifying in doubles for the WIAA state tournament.

During the season, the team had practices every weekday, lasting an hour and a half for varsity and an hour and fifteen minutes for JV. They were primarily focused on basic tennis skills, such as serving, as well as putting players in situations similar to those encountered in matches.

“We want to put players in a situation so that they [will] beat their opponent more often than they are beaten,” said Eric Nelsen, girl’s tennis coach.

Games ranged from one to four per week, amounting to a total of 20 matches over the course of the entire season. 

“Our mantra is always to beat your seed or at least get to your seed, so if you’re in fourth seed, you have to try to get fourth seed or better,” Nelsen said. “Of our seven singles and doubles teams, six got their seed or better, so that was a really good performance for us.”

The team did especially well in the Woodland Conference, with varsity placing fourth overall and JV receiving first place, after winning their matches against Eisenhower and Greendale.

“We did better at that tournament than we did during the regular season, which was quite an accomplishment and a lot of the girls played better than their expectations,” Nelsen said.

The team scheduled matches against good teams in order to challenge themselves. 

“We purposely created a very difficult schedule because we wanted to test ourselves against that,” Nelsen said. “[It’s] hard because mentally, if you lose a lot as a team and as an individual, then you start feeling down on yourself.”

The team already has a variety of goals for their next season.

“We want to make [this] a program that people want to be part of, so one of our goals is to have more and more people [join] the program,” Nelsen said. “Our goal against competition is we would love to be in the top two or three in our conference rather than fourth.

Maya Lindvall, senior, hopes that next season the team is able to do more bonding activities outside of practice.

“I wish we spent more time doing team things… doing some more stuff like that in the future would be good for the team,” Lindvall said. 

Overall, the team is proud of their achievements this season and hopes to build off of them next year.

 “I just hope that everybody continues playing and that new people try out and keep seeing the community build,” Donner said. “I think we’re a really close knit team and it’s a really special bond that we’ve built.”