BATON ROUGE — After winning a singles and doubles flight in the first tournament of the fall season, the LSU women’s tennis team looks to continue its success at the Hoosier Classic at the Outdoor Varsity Courts in Bloomington, Ind.
The tournament is slated to begin Friday, Oct. 8 and last through Sunday, Oct. 10. It features four ranked teams from last season in No. 20 LSU, host No. 25 Indiana, No. 42 Iowa and No. 58 Missouri, along with Murray State and Kansas State.
Ranked players in the tournament include No. 105 Maria Rosenberg of KSU and No. 37 Dora Vastag of Indiana, whom LSU’s Lauren Seaman will face in the first round of flight A. LSU’s Amanda Mang, ranked at No. 120, will sit out the tournament to get some rest.
Also competing in flight A for LSU will be Marina Chiarelli, who goes up against Missouri’s Katka Sevcilkova in round one. Daysi Espinal, who won her singles bracket at the UNLV Invitational on Sept. 26, will battle Iowa’s Anastasia Zhukova of Iowa in her round-one match in flight B.
Freshmen Staten Spencer and Tiffany Tucker will represent LSU in flight C and D, respectively. Camila Caliari, who sat out for singles in Las Vegas to recover from surgery, will make her first singles appearance of the fall season this weekend in flight E.
In the doubles competition, Seaman and Spencer will team up as will Chiarelli and Tucker. Caliari, who was part of the doubles team to win in Las Vegas, will pair with Espinal.
Though the Lady Tigers enter the tournament as the team finishing highest in ranking a year ago, coach Tony Minnis said that fact will not matter this weekend.
“In college tennis, there is not much difference between Nos. 10, 20 and 30,” he said. “What we are hoping for this weekend is that our players can establish rankings and our freshmen can gain experience.”
He also commented that this team is not the same as last year’s, and this tournament can serve to help them make a name for themselves.
“We have a different team than last year, and this is a chance for us to establish an identity,” he said. “Last year is over. We have some of the same players, and they need to come out with the same intensity and pick up some games.”