With a new coach and new fitness training, the Hawkeyes are ready for the season.
By Nicholas Moreano
The Iowa women’s tennis team is only in its second week of practice, but the players know firsthand about head coach Sasha Schmid’s rigorous fitness program.
Schmid’s goal is to make her players physically and mentally exhausted so when it happens during the season, the players will know how to overcome that and play to the best of their abilities.
The thought process behind the strategy is that if her players have experienced adversity and fatigue in practice and worked on getting through them, it is second nature during matches when the same hits them.
“I’m trying to encourage them that every time they’re in a position where they are uncomfortable, they’re stressed, to try to settle in and learn from it,” Schmid said.
The fitness program revolves around lots of timed running exercises such as timed 5,000-meter runs, timed miles, and exercise drills on the tennis court.
Junior Zoe Douglas said Schmid’s new program was a big adjustment at first, but in the end, it has made the Hawkeyes mentally and physically tougher for the start of the season.
Douglas wasn’t the only one who agreed that the new program has benefited the team — senior Natalie Looney also praised the system.
“I think that it makes people mentally tougher and obviously physically tougher,” she said. “But if you know you can outlast your opponent, you gain a lot of confidence from that.”
Despite the team only being in its second week of the program, the players and head coach can discern a difference from last week.
Schmid said she has seen improvement in the team’s fitness and more importantly, has seen her players grow more as a team.
Senior Aimee Tarun has noticed that the Hawkeyes have become better, more fit, and worked really well together during the early stretch of the season.
Now that the players have become more familiar with how Schmid will run practice and her fitness program, a bar has been set.
“I would say that expectations have been set, everyone seemed a little sore the first week,” Looney said. “Now, that’s the standard; if we are not sore, we need to get there.”
After two weeks of practice, the Hawks have learned to become mentally and physically strong, and they will put these qualities to the test when they head to their first tournament in Minneapolis for the Gopher Invitational on Sept. 22.
For a program that wants to make a leap into the upper echelon of the Big Ten, this fall will serve as an interesting gauge on how well the new program works. Last season, the Hawkeyes went 37-45 in singles and 48-64 in doubles in the fall, but they expect an improvement this fall.
The team’s first tournament is just under two weeks away and until then, the Hawkeyes will continue to put in the work.
“We are all ready to fight for each other, and we are working hard,” Douglas said. “Just improving day by day.”