This upcoming weekend will be a busy one for Notre Dame. They are sending two players to compete in the Lakewood Ranch Invitational in Florida while also hosting the Notre Dame Fall Invitational Tournament at the Eck Tennis Pavilion from Nov. 4-6.
Irish head coach Jay Louderback said playing in multiple tournaments will provide his players a chance to compete against different types of opponents.
“With the two tournaments, [the competition] is going to be very good,” Louderback said. “We’re sending two players to a tournament in Sarasota and some of the better teams in the country like Florida, Miami and Oklahoma State will be there. There is going to be a lot of great players down there and it is going to be a great tournament. It’s an individual tournament, so everyone is in one bracket, so our two players should get some good competition there.”
Louderback said his team is also very excited about hosting the Notre Dame Fall Invitational Tournament this weekend, where the majority of their players will compete.
“We’ve got Kansas, Denver and Illinois coming here and we’re going to play both singles and doubles, but no team scores are going to be kept,” he said. “The thing that is good for this tournament is it will give us, especially the freshman, an idea of how we do with a regular dual-type patch.”
The quality of competition at the Notre Dame Fall Invitational is going to be high, according to Louderback.
“In the tournament here, all four teams finished in the top 45 in the country last year,” he said. “I feel like, especially with us having our top three players out [Monica Robinson is not playing because she’s going down to Florida], it allows our kids to play a little higher in the lineup in a dual-match. It will also give us an idea on how our players will perform in a dual-match. It’s different because you are playing for a team in a dual-match instead of playing in an open tournament.”
Louderback also said with the team breaking up and competing in different tournaments at the same time, they will field different doubles team than the ones they usually do.
“We’re splitting up a couple of the doubles teams that played two weeks ago, and because of that, we’ve been working with a number of different combinations in doubles,” Louderback said. “So that’s probably the biggest thing we’ve been doing. We’ll probably switch them around in our matches when we’re playing here over the weekend.”
The biggest thing the team will try to do is build upon the momentum they gained at the start of the fall season, he said.
“We really felt good two weeks ago when [senior] Monica Robinson and [junior] Brooke Broda made it to the finals,” Louderback said. “They had a good tournament and then at Indiana, we had Jane Fennelly and Bess Waldrum, a senior and a freshman, together in that tournament and they played really well. We were excited with how those two combinations did and we are going to look at some different ones coming up this week.”
Louderback said he hopes some of his younger players will gain more experience by playing different kinds of competition.
“Our big thing is just getting experience and enjoy playing and have a chance to see how they compete when it’s one team against another team,” he said.
