Dizdar diary: Feb. 1
My Dear Longhorns! As all of you already know (hopefully), women’s tennis began the 2007 season this past weekend. We took exotic visits to Ames, Iowa and Lawrence, Kansas, and our first road trip of this year ended successfully! We left both places with wins; we defeated Iowa State, 7-0 and Kansas, 6-1. We flew into Des Moines, Iowa, and a big red bus picked us up from the snow-covered terminal curb. “Mr. Bubba”, a University of Texas alumnus, was the most hyped-up Longhorn fan/bus driver we ever had! We instantly knew that things could not go wrong with him driving us through Iowa and Kansas. Even though the temperatures were well below Texas temperatures, it did not feel as cold as it did in Austin before we left. At both places, we played indoors and it was quite an experience, considering the closest we got to indoor courts in Austin was playing some tennis on our UT Recreation Sports volleyball courts. Still, we all managed to adjust just fine, and we all played some pretty solid tennis. It was great to see our young freshmen perform in their first official dual matches. They get an A+ and some extra brownie points for the way they competed and carried themselves on the court. Consistently, across all six courts, our ladies were poised and looked like they were winning, no matter the score. Also, I would like to use this opportunity to personally introduce our new Lady Longhorn -- Jane Pringle. She left her home in South Africa and flew over 30 hours to get to Austin! The team has teased her a bit because of her last name; we thought her dad was a CEO of a potato chip company, and we were hoping to get some free chips. But, in all seriousness, Jane is a great kid and she is working hard to adjust to the new lifestyle and the new culture of being a student-athlete in the U.S. Also, she has already had an opportunity to play some matches during our road trip and she got her own taste of victory, defeating her opponents and impressing the rest of us with her impervious attitude on the court. Surely, she will make a great contribution to Texas Tennis in the near future. Now, we have just over a week before our next dual match, and we will take the lessons learned from these first few matches and work on improving things until then. We are really excited (especially the freshmen) to step in front of our home crowd and introduce ourselves through our performances on the court. We hope you will join us on Feb. 9 and Feb. 10 as we take on Mississippi and Arizona State! You will be thrilled with the level of enthusiasm and drive that these new players have to show, and hopefully, we, “the oldies,” will be just as fun to watch. Have a great week and, as always… Hook 'em, Horns!
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