Results
 
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio - The Slippery Rock University women's tennis team lost its first dual match of the season on the road Saturday to Youngstown State University, 4-3, at the YSU Indoor Tennis Center.
 
While Saturday's match was the first of the year for Slippery Rock it was the eighth of the season for the 4-4 Penguins, a Division I school competing out of the Horizon League.
 
Slippery Rock could not have envisioned a better start to its spring season than what its double rotation produced as SRU took the opening point from the Penguins thanks to wins out of the first and second flights.
 
Nicole Kempton and Alissia Kivi, the 22nd ranked doubles team in Division II, got The Rock going with a 6-4 victory over Lili Minich and Ghada Dirninger out of the top flight before Tina Slovak and Amaia Balaguer Brau secured the first available point of the year for SRU by way of a 7-5 triumph in the second flight against Lorena Cedeno and Line Greyling.
 
Saturday's result was a carryover from a dominant fall campaign for Kempton and Kivi, who posted a 10-2 record as a team during the individual portion of the year. Meanwhile, the YSU match marked the first time that Slovak and Balaguer Brau have been paired together.
 
While it had no bearing on the overall team score, YSU's Lydia Foster and Yeseniia Ovcharova were able to better Georgie Lancaster and Dari Sakhanova in the third flight, 6-0.
 
The singles portion of Saturday's match was highly competitive back-and-forth contest between the two evenly matched teams.
 
Cedeno started a Penguin rally with a 6-2, 6-1 victory from the second flight against Kempton to even the match. Julia Marko, the 2024 Horizon League singles champion, would give YSU its first lead of the night via a 6-2, 6-2 first flight win against seventh-ranked Balaguer Brau.
 
Youngstown State then completed the sweep of the top half of the singles flights when Ovcharova narrowly outlasted Kivi in a close 7-5, 7-5 decision.
 
With Youngstown State now needing just one more point to clinch the team victory the pressure to keep The Rock's hopes alive fell to the back half of their singles lineup.
 
Slovak notched SRU's first singles win of the night with a convincing 6-1, 6-4 showing against Claudia Coombes. She is now 17-7 in her career when competing out of the fifth flight.
 
Sakhanova followed suit by downing Foster 6-4, 6-4 in fourth-flight play to pull SRU even with its Division 1 counterparts at 3-3: leaving the team's fate up to the sixth-flight contest between Lancaster and Sarah Partida Garcia.
 
Lancaster and Partida Garcia battled to a 6-6 stalemate in the first set before Partida Garcia eked out a win in the tiebreaker 7-6 (7-2).
 
The second set was also anyone's to win as Lancaster and Partida Garcia again played to a 6-6 tie, but this time it was Lancaster who earned the 7-6 (7-5) victory to force a super tiebreaker which ultimately went to Partida Garcia, 6-1, as YSU escaped with a narrow overall win.
 
Slippery Rock will meet Division III power Carnegie Mellon University 6:30 p.m. Feb. 14 at Alpha Tennis and Fitness in Pittsburgh for the annual match between The Rock and Tartans. SRU earned a 5-4 victory over CMU a year ago.
 
 



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