By Eric Perez
Daily Bruin Contributor
The UCLA women’s tennis season kicks off with the Pac-10
Indoors, hosted by the University of Washington.
And while the tournament won’t be an official team effort,
it will give all competing players a chance to shake off the rust
after a lull between the end of fall and the start of the 2002
season.
“I’m looking forward to it. It’s going be fun
to go out there and start playing again,” said freshman Megan
Bradley, who will make her Bruin debut. “It’s been so
long since I’ve played in a tournament and stuff, so
it’ll be good to go out there and compete a little
bit.”
The Pac-10 Indoors will also give head coach Stella Sampras a
chance to see who is playing well at the season’s outset. The
tournament will have four singles brackets and three flights for
doubles teams.
“Our goals are basically for all of us to win our
flights,” sophomore Lauren Fisher said. “Hopefully we
will be playing each other in the finals and winning the doubles
(flights) and obviously someone winning the singles.”
Possible final matchups and head-to-head competition against
fellow Bruins hasn’t deterred the strong sense of unity the
team members have developed with each other.
“Of course you have to compete with each other and
that’s hard, but once it gets into the season you’re
not playing against each other, you’re playing against other
teams,” said Fisher, who feels that working with each other
day in and day out, and traveling to competitions, has made team
bonding unavoidable.
“You want (your teammates) to win their tier. If
you’re not playing you go and root your team mates on and
there is definitely a sense of unity,” junior Sarah Walker
said.
The focus on team accomplishments over individual goals is an
aspect of UCLA women’s tennis that has evolved remarkably
since last year.
“We’re all really good friends, which wasn’t
the case my first two years at UCLA,” senior Petya Marinova
said. “Everybody was just for themselves and now it just
makes it just so much more fun to want to be out there and compete
and do well, because other people actually care about
you.”