Results
 
SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. - The Slippery Rock University women's tennis team earned a 4-3 victory against Mercyhurst University in the opening round of the 2023 Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference Tournament Thursday at the SRU Tennis Courts.
 
The Rock's quarterfinal victory over the Lakers sends Slippery Rock into the PSAC Tournament semifinals where it will meet PSAC Eastern Division regular season champion West Chester University Saturday at the Burt Reese Tennis Center on the campus of Bloomsburg University.
 
Slippery Rock, the third ranked team in the Atlantic Region, will be making its fourth consecutive trip to the PSAC Tournament semifinals with a 14-7 overall record while the Lakers drop to 10-9 in 2022-23.
 
Thursday's match between two of the top teams in the region was a back-and-forth contest that came down to a close sixth-flight match between The Rock's Georgie Lancaster and Laker veteran Janice Theodora in which Lancaster captured the opening set before battling back from a late deficit in the second to pull out the victory and keep Slippery Rock's conference championship hopes alive.
 
Slippery Rock and Mercyhurst opened the day by trading doubles wins as Gabriela del Val del Toro and Nuria Martin Lopez produced a 6-0 shutout of Kiersten Brown and Sara Bertolez Puente only for Kayla Dean and Roisin Murphy to outlast SRU's No. 1 pairing of Adriana Gonzalez Sanchez and Teddi Isherwood, 6-4.
 
Undeterred, SRU captured the first point of the match courtesy of their dominant third flight team of freshmen Dari Sakhanova and Tina Slovak, who bested Theodora and Nadja Ostojic to send Slippery Rock into the singles portion of the match leading 1-0.
 
Sakhanova and Slovak have now won eight straight matches and are a nearly perfect 16-3 as a team this season.
 
Mercyhurst pulled even with The Rock at 1-1 to open singles play as the first match to finish was a 6-3, 6-0 victory for Brown over Slovak out of the fifth flight.
 
The punch-counterpunch theme of the match continued for the entirety of singles action as SRU and Mercyhurst traded wins the remainder of the afternoon.
 
The third flight bout between Sakhanova and Ostojic was the next to finish with Sakhanova racking up her fifth straight win, and 14th overall victory of the season, by way of a 6-0, 6-1 triumph.
 
Following a 6-2, 6-3 setback from Gonzalez Sanchez against Dean in the top flight, Martin Lopez stretched her personal win streak to 10 by downing Bertolez Puente 6-1, 6-3 in the fourth flight to give SRU a 3-2 overall lead and in need of just one more victory to clinch the match.
 
Murphy kept the Lakers' hopes alive courtesy of tightly contested 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 three-set victory over del Val del Toro in the second flight, setting up winner-take-all finish from the sixth flight between Lancaster and Theodora.
 
Any thoughts of a Mercyhurst road upset were put to rest by Lancaster in a narrow win.
 
After taking the opening set 6-2, Lancaster would find herself trailing at various points late in the second set. However, with the score 6-5 in favor of Theodora, The Rock's sophomore rallied back once more to tie the set at 6-6 leading to an eventual tiebreaker win to send SRU through to the semifinals.
 
Slippery Rock and West Chester are scheduled for a 10 a.m. start time Saturday in Bloomsburg. The Rock and Golden Rams did not meet this season, but SRU did defeat WCU 6-1 a year ago during the regular season.
 
If victorious Saturday, Slippery Rock advances to the PSAC Tournament championship match where it would meet the winner Saturday's other semifinal between Indiana University (Pa.) and Millersville University.
 
 
 
 
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