Six-love: OPHS girls tennis senior captains achieve massive success
On a perfect fall day, 74 degrees and sunny with a hint of light (but not ball-diverting!) breeze, the Oak Park High School girls tennis team gathered in the most secluded corner of campus for a biweekly league match.
The courts buzzed with the excitement and nerves of gameday, although with a record like the OPHS team’s, there wasn’t a whole lot to be anxious about. Having won all but one game this season, a win was almost guaranteed, even against one of their self-professed toughest competitors, Simi Valley High School.
“Our strategy is to be incredibly aggressive at the net and at the baseline,” senior captain Sofia Selcer said. “At the net, you want to constantly get the ball and put the ball away, and at baseline, you want to be consistent, but also be able to set your partner up to be able to put that ball away.”
Of course, hard work is at the core of their success. Practice takes place three times a week, with games every Tuesday and Thursday–not to mention many players also compete in unaffiliated tournaments over the weekend. Still, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday’s work might be the toughest of all.
“So we get to practice, and once coach gets there, he’s like, okay, guys, run five laps,” Selcer said. “So we’ll go and we’ll run five laps around the court. And then he’ll say okay, guys, get to your spots. And so basically that means five of us on each side of the court will line up, and we start running suicides for like 30 minutes and just sprint around. And then he’ll put us on our courts and we’ll hit, we’ll have drills or we’ll play practice matches. It’s fun,” Selcer said, laughing. “It’s just tiring.”
Pregame, the two teams line up on the court facing each other while Selcer announces the lineup of the day: who’s playing, singles or doubles and on which court. After that, the teams break up, and the girls circle up to discuss strategy with their coach, Adam Neilson. Noticeably quieter than their boisterous opponents– that is, until they erupt into a pregame chant, ending with a resonant “go Eagles!”
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