Women’s Tennis Returns Home to Face A-10 Champ Temple

The Lions will play their final home tune-up before Ivy League play against the Temple Owls, the reigning A-10 champions, on Friday. The Lions will enter Friday’s contest with a record of 3-5 on the season, while the Owls come into the matchup with a 6-4 record. Temple has played a few Ivy foes already— the team lost to Dartmouth and Princeton but beat Penn 4-3.

“Temple is a competitive team,” head coach Ilene Weintraub said. “I expect it to be a close match.”

Columbia is coming off a weekend where it was narrowly edged by University of Massachusetts-Amherst and then lost to perennial power Boston University, 7-0.

The Owls, on the other hand, come off a tough defeat by the Big Green, their fourth match in five days that week.

Regardless of Columbia’s opponent, however, Weintraub believes that her team can play with the best of them.

“I really think we have a tremendous opportunity this year,” Weintraub said. “We have been competitive with all of the best teams.”

In the match against BU, Weintraub was particularly encouraged by the play of sophomore Natasha Makarova, who managed to stay with the Terriers’ top singles player despite an injury.

“Natasha was not at 100 percent,” Weintraub said, “but she managed to get up 4-1 in the second set. I think we have to stay focused, determined, and resilient in the course of a match.”

The Owls should prove a formidable opponent for the Lions this weekend. The defending A-10 champions return all eight of the starting players from their winning team from last season, including junior Anastasiia Rukavyshnykova, who was named A-10 Women’s Performer of the Week this past week. Rukavyshnykova went 3-0 in singles and 2-1 in doubles to earn the distinction, with wins at both third and fourth singles. The Ukraine native beat the No. 4 player from Dartmouth in straight sets, and improved her record to 15-4 in singles this season with a sparkling record of 7-3 in her past 10 matches.

Columbia will take on Temple at the Dick Savitt Tennis Center on Friday in a match scheduled to begin at 2 p.m.