I must confess that I know very little about tennis; I do not watch or follow it, or really have any engagement with it whatsoever. I mean, Serena and Venus Williams are both supposed to be really good, right? So when I was assigned to cover the UMass Boston women’s tennis team versus the University of Southern Maine, it provided me with a unique challenge: covering a sport I knew next to nothing about. If I tried to write this article with proper tennis terminology, it would be as painful and cringeworthy as ESPN’s Max Kellerman trying to talk about professional hockey. So, to spare both myself and my readers the embarrassment of me pretending to know what a “foot fault” is, consider this article to be a digital record of my first experience covering the sport of tennis.
My tennis covering journey did not start well because I got lost on the way to the court. I found out via a kind passerby that the tennis court at Boston College High is where the UMass Boston men and women’s teams play…which was in the exact opposite direction that I was heading at the time: down Morrissey Boulevard and past the row of apartments heading toward the JFK/UMass MBTA station. D’oh! By the time I actually got to the court, I was confused. I thought this would be in some kind of enclosed area, with bleachers or a press box to sit in. It was literally just a little park court, with the spectators having to watch from just outside on the grass. Some parents from both the UMass Boston and USM teams brought chairs to watch their daughters play. That was nice. As far as the actual game went? Well…good, I guess. I honestly had no idea what was going on during the actual game, so I looked up the box score on the UMass Boston Athletics website and found that, indeed, the women’s team won. That’s awesome! And they won by a dominant margin, blanking USM by a lopsided score of 9–0.
Five Beacons went 2–0, and seven of them clinched individual victories to give UMass Boston the number four seed in next week’s LEC Tournament. Sophomore Lydia Chan, junior Lia Vassiliadis, freshman Elena Albano, senior Meghan Moriarty, and freshman Aya Kamil all went 2–0 in the win to put an exclamation point on the day. At the beginning of the match, Vassiliadis and Moriarty both teamed up to go 8–0 in doubles against USM’s Maggie Brock and Lilly Adams.
The Beacons would extend that lead to 2–0 at number one doubles when Chan and Albano combined to defeat Emma Nassif and Kenadi Sawyer 8–1. They would go on to sweep the doubles action by the third set. Sophomore Skylar Robles and Kamil defeated Breanna Miclette and Rachel Grome 8–2. Vassiliadis would continue her excellent afternoon by beating Sawyer 6–0, 6–0 at second-flight singles action. Albano would take care of her own match victory with a 6–0, 6–0 win by herself at third singles. Albano would clinch the Beacons’ match victory with a 6–0, 6–0 win of her own at third singles.
The Tuesday sweep was UMass Boston’s third sweep of the year, and their second 9–0 shutout of the season. It was also Robles’s and Kamil’s first collegiate victories.