LINDSBORG — The Ellsworth girls’ tennis team took home the team medal, as well as four individual medals, Sept. 11 at the Smoky Valley Tennis Classic. The Bearcats scored first out of eight teams with 58 points.

Junior Karli Haase placed first overall in singles. Junior Hannah Vague placed second in singles, losing only to Haase in the championship round.

In doubles, the team of junior Reygan Coonrod and senior Inarie Rippert placed first and the team of sophomore Makenna Anderson and senior Felis De La Cruz placed eighth.

For followers of the team, it was an unusual sight to see Haase and Vague pitted against each other in tournament play.

“This was an open draw tournament,” head coach Eric Anderson said. “There were no ones or twos in divisions.”

Normally, one player would be designated in the No. 1 singles bracket and the other in the No. 2 singles bracket and they would never face each other in play.

The tournament took place at both the Smoky Valley High School courts and the Bethany College courts.

“Singles started the day at the high school and doubles started their day at the college,” Anderson said. “If they won their first match, then they all came to the high school. If you lost your first match, then you went to the college. Since all of our players won their first match, we just spent the rest of the day at the high school.”

Anderson said he was pleased with his team’s performance, despite some difficulties.

“It was a good day for us. We’ve been dealing with some injuries,” he said. “The girls played pretty good yesterday under some tough conditions against good opponents. The weather has been so weird. It’s been cool, and then we’re playing in 90-degree heat, and we hadn’t been practicing in 90-degree heat, but we still had a good day.

“We have a pretty talented team. I don’t want to gloat or anything, but they are pretty good and we expected our players to be in the finals, or at least in the top half of the draw, and that’s where we ended up.”

The Bearcat squad has a surprising depth, as well as youth, on its side this year, much of which can be attributed to the training programs and summer programs that begin as early as junior high.

“We have two seniors on our top six, and only three seniors on our top eight. It’s a relatively young team,” Anderson said. “I think we have more depth this year than we’ve ever had.

“On Tuesday in Phillipsburg, Karli sat out because of an injury, so we moved Hannah to ones, and we brought along a JV player, Addie Harmon, to play No. 2 singles, and Addie went 3-0. I think we could do that with about anybody in our top nine or 10 players and sub one in and not miss a beat.”

And with the rest from not playing in Phillipsburg, Haase was able to play in the larger tournament at Smoky Valley.

Anderson said the junior high program has helped the high school team play at a higher level.

“Our junior high program has really helped our girls’ team,” he said. “We get them hooked early and they start liking that they have success in junior high and they come out, and instead of going out for a different sport, they go out for tennis. When we didn’t have junior high tennis, by the time they were freshmen, we were just trying to teach them how to hold a racket and how to hit a tennis ball, and now we don’t have to do that. They’ve already had one or two years of that in junior high, so we can keep going and teach them different things and different concepts so they get better and better, quicker and quicker.”

Anderson also credits a flexible summer program to keep the players’ skills up.

“I put on a summerlong thing. We get out and we work three days a week,” he said. “The girls hit a lot of tennis balls and developed a lot of skills during that time. It helps us out tremendously. You look at our top six right now, and I would say most of those girls were out all summer long.

“We’re a little different. We only hit three times a week during the summer and we take the breaks when we’re supposed to take breaks, like the Fourth of July and the beginning of school. It’s not like basketball, where they practice in the morning and then go play in an event that night. We just hit for two hours. I don’t force them to play any summer tournaments or take them anywhere. We just work on ourselves here, and the girls like that they don’t have to do something twice a day, then travel to say Sterling or Hoisington and play a basketball game or volleyball game.”

However, Anderson noted tournament play during the school year can be a lot on both the players and the coaches. He tries to accommodate conflicting schedules.

“It is a lot. We have two girls who are also cheerleaders, so they’ll be on the sidelines tonight for the football game, and we have several in the musical, several in FFA and FCCLA, and just a lot of kids involved, and we want our kids to be involved so that they can have the experience of a normal high school student. We work around that. I know we’ll have FFA week coming up before long, and we’ll be missing some of my kids to go do stuff, and the same thing with the musical coming along, and we just work around it.

“You’ll see us practicing sometimes at 6 a.m. just so the cheerleaders can practice after school, or so we don’t miss the majority of our team at an after school practice.

We make adjustments to accommodate everything so the kids can stay involved in all the activities. It’s the way we try to develop the kids. There is more to life than tennis.”

Overall, Anderson is pleased with his team’s progress.

“It’s just been steady improvement this year. They are all moving better. They all understand the game a little better,” he said. “It’s just making minor tweaks to their game. That’s all I ask them. We take it a day at a time, and I tell the girls every day at practice when they leave the gate, ‘Let’s find something we got better at today.’” The Bearcats host a meet at home Sept. 18.