ANNAPOLIS, Md. – The Navy women's tennis team (16-3) dropped a 5-2 decision to No. 30 Old Dominion (11-5) Thursday at the Tose Family Tennis Center, marking its first home loss of the spring dual season.
Navy lost the doubles point for the first time in the last 10 matches, dropping both the No. 1 and No. 2 competitions, with the No. 3 match going unfinished. The Midshipmen rallied on the singles circuit, earning victories at the No. 3 and No. 6 positions, but ultimately were outscored by the Monarchs, 4-2, in singles to secure the three-point decision in favor of ODU.
"Going in we knew these guys (Old Dominion) were good," said head coach
Keith Puryear. "Year in and year out they are one of the top schools in our region. They've played an extremely competitive schedule and are well coached. We knew a couple things going in, that it was going to be a challenging match and we couldn't go in expecting them to give us anything."
To open competition on Thursday, the Monarch pairing of Sofia Johnson and Yuliia Starodubtseva downed Navy's No. 1 doubles team of
Kacey Moore (Sr., Wellington, Fla.) and
Jillian Taggart (Jr., Fair Oaks, Calif.) in a 6-2 decision, prior to securing the doubles point with a hard-fought victory at the No. 2 position as Shahar Biran and Aleysa Yakubovich downed
Katreina Corpuz (Sr., Ewa Beach, Hawai'i) and
Meghana Komarraju (Sr., Viena, Va.) in a 7-5 match.
The No. 3 doubles competition saw the first set finish in a 6-6 draw, as the contest that featured the Mids'
Casey Accola (Jr., Winter Garden, Fla.) and
Emily Tannenbaum (Fr., Commack, N.Y.), along with ODU's Ralitsa Alexandrova and Tatsiana Sasnouskaya went unfinished.
With a 1-0 advantage in hand over the Midshipmen enter singles play, Old Dominion quickly jumped out a two-point lead as Marina Alcaide defeated Komarraju in the No. 4 singles competition (6-1, 6-0). The loss snapped a 12-match win streak in singles for Komarraju, tying the longest such streak of her career and the third-longest streak in program history.
Moments later, at the No. 5 position, the Monarchs went up 3-0 with a straight-set win by Yakubovich over Corpuz (6-0, 6-1). ODU secured match victory when Starodubtseva, the No. 28 singles player in the nation, earned victory over Taggart in the No. 1 competition (6-1, 6-0).
After Old Dominion extended its lead to 5-0 with a win by Sasnouskaya at the No. 2 spot over Tannenbaum (6-3, 6-3), Navy got on the board with its first win of the day as Moore took a three-set battle against Johnson in the No. 3 match (6-4, 0-6, 10-8).
The final contest of the day to be decided was the No. 6 singles competition, in which
Stella Ribaudo (So., Chicago, Ill.) bested Biran in straight sets (7-5, 6-4).
"I thought we did a really good job creating opportunities for ourselves in every single match, regardless of what the score was," continued Puryear. "Some of the matches just came down to whether we had the ability to take advantage of those opportunities. The good thing was that was we were creating those opportunities, I would say we just have to focus on recognizing those chances and taking advantage of them."
UP NEXT
Navy will have an opportunity to bounce back quickly as it welcomes Lehigh to Annapolis on Saturday at 1 p.m. for its Patriot League opener. After their match against the Mountain Hawks on Saturday, the Midshipmen are slated to take on Bucknell on Sunday at 10 a.m.
