BATON ROUGE – The LSU women’s tennis team has emerged with four consecutive victories and has been selected among the university’s athletic programs with the BASF Team Chemistry MVP Award for the month of March.
The Lady Tigers (15-7, 5-4 SEC) has won seven of their last 10 matches and are coming off a weekend road sweep of No. 21 Ole Miss and No. 35 Mississippi State. The win over No. 21 Ole Miss marked the highest ranked victory under third-year coach Julia Sell. The program has defeated a pair of Top 30 teams for the first time since the 2009 season.
LSU climbed 16 spots to No. 25 in this week’s ITA national rankings. The last time the Lady Tigers were ranked inside the ITA’s Top 25 was to conclude the 2009 season.
Joana Vale Costa and Skylar Kuykendall check in at No. 39 and No. 69 respectively in the ITA singles rankings. The Lady Tigers also have two of their doubles teams ranked. Vale Costa and Noel Scott are No. 32, while Kuykendall and Abigail Owens hold the No. 66 spot.
Kuykendall has won 19 of her 22 dual match decisions on the season highlighted by an 11-1 mark in the No. 2 singles position. She has reeled off a season’s best eight consecutive victories with five of those decisions coming against ranked competition.
Skylar Holloway and Ella Taylor have played a key role and anchored the bottom of LSU’s lineup. The duo has posted a combined 22-9 mark from the No. 5 and No. 6 singles spots. They garnered convincing 6-0 and 6-1 wins in their third sets during LSU’s win over Ole Miss.
With four matches remaining in the regular season, LSU has already secured five SEC victories which equal the most since the 2011 season.
The Lady Tigers square off with No. 20 Kentucky (Friday, April 10 – 4 p.m.) and No. 8 Vanderbilt (Sunday, April 12 – 11 a.m.) in their final two home matches. Admission is free to ‘Dub’ Robinson Stadium.
As the world’s largest chemical company, BASF’s manufacturing presence in Louisiana includes operations in Geismar, Zachary and Vidalia, with nearly 2,000 employees and contractors in the state. For more information about careers at BASF, visit www.basf.us/la.