Tennis: Tigers rolling into playoffs

Douglas girls' tennis coach Roger Rusmisel made a statement before the fall season started that his players were focused on establishing the program as one of the elite programs in the region.

Traditionally speaking, it was almost laughable. After all, when it comes to girls' tennis as a team sport in Northern Nevada, there is Reno and Galena. For at least the last decade, everyone else followed in a distant pack.

But Rusmisel knew something at the beginning of the year that the rest of the region is only just now starting to figure out.

"The thing that makes this group different is not the talent so much as the overall competitiveness," he said earlier this week as the Tigers were preparing to wrap up the regular season with a non-league match against Reno. "What this team has is that desire to compete. They don't give up any easy sets. Every one plays every point really hard.

"We just have a competitive spirit and attitude. It comes directly from them, it's something you can't really coach."

Quietly, Douglas has done exactly what it originally hoped to do. The Tigers rattled off nine wins in their first nine matches of the season, with the latest being a 17-1 pummeling of Damonte Ranch Wednesday afternoon.

Only perennial powerhouse Reno, a team that Douglas is believed never to have beaten, was left on the Tigers' schedule Thursday. The results of that match can be viewed online at www.recordcourier.com.

The Tigers clinched what is believed to be the first league or division championship in school history and enter next week's team regional playoffs as a surprise favorite.

It's a result that exceeded even the most optimistic of expectations.

"My hope coming in was that we might be able to take Galena or South Tahoe to finish second place," Rusmisel said. "Then we would've been able to send three singles and three doubles to regionals. That would have been ideal."

The team's goals for the season took a sudden shift in Week 1 when the Tigers upset defending league champ Galena 11-7 in Reno. They followed that the next week with a 14-4 thumping of South Tahoe.

"Early on there when we took Galena, I thought we had something very special going," Rusmisel said. "There was suddenly this sense that our destiny in league was in our hands. Then we went up and beat South Tahoe and we started getting the sense that we have the potential to beat anyone."

Now the Tigers have home court advantage all the way through the playoffs until the regional championship, which is at the Caughlin Club in Reno this year. The first round starts Tuesday at 3 p.m., although the Tigers' opponent has not yet been set.

So where did this sudden rise to the cream of the Northern 4A come from?

One could point at two-time defending regional singles champion Amelia Ritger, who is 26-1 on the year and 93-3 for her career at Douglas. Or there's freshman Kari TenBroeck, who is 22-1 on the year and appears to be some of Ritger's biggest competition heading into the individual tournament this year.

Senior Cesarina Ceglia had a breakthrough season, going 22-3 and beating one of the top players in the area, Galena's Hannah Llop, 7-6 (7-4).

One could look at the depth of the doubles' squad, starting with seniors Jamie Lundergreen and Linsey Glass, who are 15-3 on the year and will probably be seeded at the individual regional championships in two weeks.

Or there is the breakout tandem of sisters, Sarah and Emily Weaver, who are 17-3 on the year despite this being Emily's first year playing the sport.

There's the carousel of available players to fill the No. 3 doubles spot, including Susie White and Katie Sawicki, who are 11-2 on the year, or Kim Lowe, Cate Kegg, Zoe VanderByl, Rochelle Seymour and Gabby Buma.

But this year's success started long before the players reported for fall camp in August.

Senior captains Ceglia and Lundergreen approached Rusmisel after last season and asked if they could start up a true offseason program.

"Tennis usually gets an interesting reputation at the high school because a lot of other sports have strict year-round programs," Lundergreen said. "Other sports are very established in their routines, but tennis had this reputation as a sport anyone could pick up. It wasn't real hard to get into and it was hard to get people's respect.

"We were ready to make the tennis team stand out at Douglas High. We wanted it to be a sport where you had to work hard all year to be a part of."

Ceglia agreed.

"We did weightlifting and conditioning (during the season) but we thought we're not really doing that much during the offseason, so we should use that time to get stronger," she said. "We wanted to be able to show more discipline as a team.

We wanted to step things up a notch and get everyone else on board with it."

The program had an immediate buy-in from it veteran players, but Rusmisel was also able to recruit athletes from other sports like White (track, basketball) and Emily Weaver (softball) to participate.

The team focused mainly on conditioning and agility during the cold winter months and took back to the courts in late spring. Starting in July, they were meeting for voluntary practices three times a week.

"A lot of people were at the workouts which was really great to see," Ceglia said.

"Everyone who wanted to be on the team was there for almost every workout. There was just this overall attitude of wanting to get better."

But even after all the extra work, both Ceglia and Lundergreen said the players weren't certain there would be much of a payoff.

"I didn't really know if it was going to help until the season actually started," Ceglia said. "Then it was like, 'Wow, everyone is a lot better.'"

Lundgreen said it wasn't until the Galena win that the team truly started to realize what it had.

"That was our coming of age as a team," she said. "During the summer we could tell we had more consistency and more commitment. But then we played Galena and it was like we really have something here.

"It was a whole step up from summer. It took us to a whole new level. We'd gotten so used to playing each other, we couldn't really gauge our improvement. From there on, we just wanted to see how far we could take it."

With the league title in hand, Rusmisel said the school and the community are beginning to take notice of the program.

"People are beginning to talk about us a little bit," he said. "I'm hearing from other coaches and teachers. I had a football player in one of my classes turn and congratulate one of my tennis players on winning the league.

"We haven't had that notoriety before. It's been very inspiring to the team."

Inspiring is also a word the team uses for Rusmisel.

"Coach is probably the biggest reason we've become such a good program," Lundergreen said. "He's in his third year now and this program hasn't had a coach for that long in quite a while. He started organizing some improvements to our courts and basically getting us to take some pride in our program."

Ceglia said it was that pride that brought about the idea that the team could accomplish what is has this year.

"He pushed us to think we could actually do this," she said. "He taught us that we have the potential to be great. A lot of our confidence as a team comes from him."