Phoenix: the home of the Suns, the best thunderstorms, even better sunsets, and a hotbed for college tennis tournaments.

Well, perhaps the latter description of Phoenix is not entirely accurate, but last weekend the Pomona-Pitzer Women’s Tennis Team squared off in two battles in Arizona, first to Gustavus Adolphus (8-1) and then, in a shortened contest, to Trinity (TX) University (5-1).

Photo by Joe Koch The men's tennis team suffered two losses this past week to Redlands and Sonoma State. This week, the Hens finish their dual matches against UC Santa Cruz on Sunday and visiting Washington and Lee on Monday.

Neither day strayed near success for the team, who expected a much better result.

"They’re a good team, probably a little bit better than us. We were expecting a good match and we lost 8-1," said Sheree Schwartz ’02. It was humiliating to lose [so lopsided] to them. They are better than us, but not that much better."

Singles player Bridget Humphrey ’00 won the sole individual battle for Pomona-Pitzer on the day, while Schwartz, the regular number three singles player, was once again unable to participate on Saturday due to religious reasons. As a result the match started slow for the team, and they were unable from to get back on track.

"We lost all three doubles points quickly. It was really frustrating," said Schwartz, "to lose 8-1 to that team as it looks bad for Nationals. If we’re not as good of a team as them, we’re close."

The disaster against Gustavus Adolphus is actually quite deceiving, for the team has played strong all season long. The Gusties knocked off UC-San Diego earlier in the season, 5-4, while Pomona-Pitzer dropped the similar fixture by the same margin. Also, at that point in the season Meghan Gould ’01, the team’s number four singles player and Schwartz’ regular doubles partner, had not yet returned to the team from basketball.

Schwartz was able to return to the courts Sunday as the team squared off against Trinity University. The match, ironically in the sunny state of Arizona, was delayed due to rain in the early morning.

"Sunday it rained," explained Schwartz, "so matches didn’t start until 11:15. We lost all three doubles points again. We had only three courts to play on all weekend. One through three singles played, but after that we had to run back to our cars and get to the airport."

Unfortunately the team had a flight to catch, and due to the lack of courts the players were in somewhat of a rush. The first two seeded singles players, Bridget Humphrey ’99 and Heather Gorman ’99 both lost, and Trinity had secured the match. Schwartz had an interesting dilemma, as she was informed up 4-1 in her second set, having won the first, that she would have to win the next two games or the team would have to leave for the airport and concede those sets.

Schwartz hung tough and pulled out the victory winning those two games, but despite the good finish to the weekend the team did not come home overly ecstatic.

"They were both really good teams," said Humphrey. "I think had we been able to play out the match against Trinity we would have had more wins."

"It is mostly disappointing because these were big opportunities to play well against these teams and prove something to the Nationals committee. Instead we hurt ourselves more than we helped ourselves. But we play UCSD [today] and we’re not of Nationals yet," said Schwartz.

Humphrey echoed similar sentiments about the weekend matches. "[This past weekend] hurts us for going to Nationals, but these teams were ranked really high. Trinity is notoriously ranked high. They were in the semifinals of Nationals my freshman year. [Today] we can hopefully beat [UCSD]. If we can beat them and then beat CMC, we can move up to number two in the region. The top two teams in the region go to Nationals."

With Gould back and Schwartz playing this Friday, the team hopes to make one last defining statement to the Nationals committee before the season comes to a close.