Tennis boys find more fight in Wolves
Published 12:00 pm Saturday, September 20, 2003
On Wednesday, South Whidbey and Coupeville tennis players were measuring the intensity of the competition in small degrees.
Having blanked the Wolves 5-0 at home the previous Friday, the Falcons were hoping for a little more of a challenge when they visited Coupeville’s courts this week. And that’s what the got — just a little more of a challenge.
In a 6-0 meet win that came so easily in some spots that some of South Whidbey’s players lost games and sets more for lack of focus than lack of ability, at least the Falcons’ top two players — junior Tim Klopfenstein and senior Kai Fleming-Snow — had to play hard to win.
Playing at first singles for South Whidbey, Klopfenstein struggled for consistency in his second meeting with Wolves senior Eric Taylor. After just getting by Taylor 7-5 in the first set, Klopfenstein got pinned to the baseline and fell victim to double faults and unforced errors in the second, losing 4-6. He regained control in the third to win 7-5.
Fleming-Snow had all of his troubles early. Unable to get his racquet on the ball consistently against Coupeville junior Trevor Mueller, he lost the opening set 2-6. But for the next two sets, he forced Mueller into a one-dimensional game at the baseline to take two consecutive 6-4 sets and the win.
“I was just missing everything, which didn’t help,” Fleming-Snow said of his opening set.
At third singles, senior Alex Hoelting had an easy time of it, winning. 6-2, 6-3. The story was largely the same for the Falcons three doubles teams: Only the first doubles team of Oliver Shafaat and Rhys Stanley had a little trouble, going to three sets after losing 4-6 in the second to Coupeville’s Bill Bond and Sean Brown. But all it took was a pep talk from their coach, Tom Kramer, to get them back on track to bookend that set with two 6-2 set wins for the match.
After the meet, Kramer said his boys need to work on two things in particular if they want to bring up their level of play.
“Consistency and concentration,” he said. “That’s the main challenge.”
The Falcons are now 2-0 in non-conference play this season.
