Lakeland tennis sweeps Rhinelander

The Rhinelander High School girls’ tennis team knew prior to the season the road to reclaiming the Great Northern Conference would likely have to go through defending conference champion Lakeland.

That’s still true following Tuesday’s GNC dual between the two teams. However, Rhinelander’s path has become a lot bumpier — if not completely impassable. 

The T-Birds took six matches in straight sets and put the cherry on top with a match tiebreaker win at No. 4 singles as they rolled to a 7-0 sweep at the RHS tennis courts.

The loss for Rhinelander stung on a number of levels. For starters, it dropped Rhinelander to fifth in the conference standings, 16 points behind co-leaders Pacelli and Lakeland. It also marked the first time that Rhinelander has been swept in a conference dual since prior to joining the GNC in 2010.

“I think we saw what we need to work on. We just weren’t able to get after it,” Hodag coach Matt Nichols said afterward. “Honestly, I think they out-hustled us in a lot of matches. They came in, they were confident, they moved their feet and we were caught standing still and not ready for a lot of their shots.”

Rhinelander almost avoided the sweep as sophomore Sam Aschenbrenner rallied from down 4-5 in the second set at No. 4 singles to force a match tiebreaker, and staved off two match points to get back on serve 9-9, but back-to-back errors gave Lakeland’s Ellie Baker an 11-9 win. 

“That was kind of a bummer,” Nichols said. “The first set she was up 5-2 and couldn’t close. On the flip side she was down in the second set, came back and forced a match tiebreak. I thought she played a great match. She was very sporty, played very confident and just fell short in overtime.”

That was the main highlight for a Hodag team that has lost five straight dual meets, and 9 of 11 overall dating back to an invite in Wausau Aug. 26. Doubles has been the stronger side of Rhinelander’s lineup, but it went against strength of Lakeland’s lineup after the T-Birds won the conference title in all three doubles flights last year.

Dawsyn Barkus and Brooke Sisel fell to Lakeland’s Ali Timmerman and Kristina Ouimette 6-3, 6-3 in the top flight. Evelyn Sawyer and Maya Patrick lost 6-3, 6-4 to Lila Biller and Alyssa Erickson at No. 2. Willow VanDenHeuvel and Eva Heck were outpaced at No. 3 by Chance Jacobs and Elise Lamers, 6-2, 6-1.

“I don’t know that there truly was a huge difference beyond their mindset,” Nichols said of the doubles matches. “They came in and the girls have to expect tight matches. It’s not that if you’re in a tight match, you’re playing bad. You’ve just got to stick with it, stay true to yourself and I think that we, under the pressure, started to crumble a little bit.”

Things didn’t go any better in singles where Kesley Winter, Karmen Lopez and Maddie Legrey won only four games combined in a trio of straight-set losses in the top three flights to Lakeland’s Sarah Barton, Norah Strasburg and Sierra Wallace. 

“Ninety percent of the matches we’re not getting crushed,” Nichols said. “They’re not putting balls away at us. We’re just not able to keep the ball in play, or can’t set it up where we can last in the rally or finish a shot.”

Prior to the start of the season, Nichols stated the team’s goal was to not only reclaim the GNC title in 2024, but set the stage for a run of conference titles in the future. Three matches into league play, the Hodags find themselves 1-2 and in danger of finishing worse in the conference than they did last year, when they took third — with losses already on the books to the GNC co-leaders.

Nichols said he was not quite ready to concede that goal — noting Rhinelander rallied from a 6-1 loss to Lakeland in 2022 to edge the T-Birds for the conference championship — but admitted the Hodags’ title hopes are in dire straits. 

“Mathematically, we kind of just got stuck in a hole. Is it impossible? No, but it really depends on how they do against the rest of the conference teams and how we do against the rest of the conference teams,” he said. “We can watch how the rest of the matches go. We’ve bounced back from a 1-6 before but I think the bigger thing is everything we do has consequences. We talked about that and what is the consequence of what we do at practice. Are we putting in everything we’ve got or not? We saw that two years ago when we came back from a 1-6 loss. We’ll see if we can do that same thing this year.”

The Hodags took on Phillips Thursday at the RHS tennis courts in a match that concluded after press time for today’s edition and will head to Wausau today and tomorrow for their final non-conference invite of the regular season. 

Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].