Beyond the senior who went to State last year, and a junior who will probably be on a doubles team, Emporia High girls tennis coach Melinda Flohr has a lot of question marks to address.
Flohr knows that senior Jordan Sosa will more than likely be her No. 1 singles player, and Kaitlin Gile is likely to be one half of the top doubles team. After that, Flohr has a handful of players in the running for the rest of the varsity spots, and she says the process of sorting those out is “really up in the air right now.” That’s one reason she’s happy that the Spartans’ first varsity tournament isn’t until Sept. 5, when they travel to Salina.
“And we’re kind of in the process of doing some challenge matches this week, also, which will kind of help,” Flohr said. “It helps more with singles than doubles. Sometimes, you have a player that can beat a lot of people at singles, but they’re not that strong at doubles.”
Sosa is the most accomplished player on the EHS roster; she spent much of the last two seasons as the No. 1 singles player before qualifying for State last year as a doubles player with Rose Nasrazadani, who graduated. She’d like to taste State again as a singles player after last year’s short doubles stay at the Class 5A tourney, held at EHS. She and Nasrazadani lost to St. Thomas Aquinas in their first match, then lost to Arkansas City to finish their tournament. The experience was an eye-opener for Sosa, showing her how many good players there are in Kansas.
“(We) actually learned from it a lot,” Sosa said. “We just didn’t do too well the first round, and learned their weaknesses.”
Gile’s varsity experience has the junior likely ticketed for doubles, but Flohr said she has no idea who might join her. Seniors other than Sosa who are in the mix for the top spots include Danielle Anliker, Chloe Blake, Nancy Delgado, Natalie Juarez and Noelle Waters. Brooke Gutierrez and Holly Kraft are other juniors who are vying for spots.
As of Monday, the EHS roster contained 42 players in all, including nine seniors and 12 juniors. Flohr said last week that many of the new Spartans who are going out for the sport haven’t played competitively before.
“So we’re having to spend some time going over basics — reviewing how to keep score, even, some things like that,” she said.
But one silver lining Flohr is seeing is that the intramural tennis program at the middle school level is starting to bear fruit.
“I think it’s gonna be beneficial for us, definitely,” she said. “I mean, the earlier you expose kids to the game, it just makes sense their skills are gonna be more developed when they get to the high school.”