Varsity Kansas - The Blog

For the fourth time in five years, Wichita Independent won the 3-2-1A girls tennis title. Collegiate finished second.

Independent did it with a whole lot of young talent — check this out: freshman Emily Ramseyer and sophomore Radha Nagireddy won the doubles title, while freshman Caroline Lincoln finished third in singles. Think this team will be around for awhile?

Collegiate senior Jessica Ball won her first singles title, beating the previously undefeated Aslihan Vuruskan, a foreign exchange student from Turkey who attends South Central. It was an unbelievable comeback by Ball. Check out Sunday’s story for more.

We still haven’t heard from Class 5A, where Kapaun and Gillian Hush were the favorites. I’m assuming Topeka was hit by rain, which would have delayed everything. As for Class 6A, I seriously doubt that thing went very far today — it was at Shawnee Mission East and I know Lawrence took a major hit with rain, hence the delay, twice, of the KU-Baylor football game.

Well, tennis over, and golf is almost there. Golf finishes up on Tuesday. Amazing how fast a season goes.

There’s so many meanings in that title, don’t you think? I mean, it’s the last day of the work/school week. And, hey, it’s Friday night football.

But before we get to tonight, how about South’s sophomore backup quarterback Zach Villarreal who threw for 345 yards and three touchdowns in his first start. Wow. That’s impressive. Of course, that was slightly overshadowed by Southeast’s Joseph Randle (276 rushing yards) and Trezz Tillman (164 rushing). But still.

Getting away from football, state girls tennis starts today, with Kapaun looking to three-peat at 5A, someone in the area trying to do something at 6A (KC schools continue to dominate the biggest class), and of course, Collegiate and Independent are playing today at Riverside Tennis Center in 3-2-1A.

One of tonight’s most interesting game interesting games is East at Derby. Why? Because it’s East. That’s good enough to draw a big crowd to the Panthers’ stadium.

I personally like Wellington at Mulvane. Two good teams in a tough district opener.

Alright, since I already touched on these games earlier in the week, that’s all I’ve got for now. What’s on your mind?

Kristin Mehler, one of our correspondents, was in Sterling covering Class 3-2-1A sub-state tennis on Saturday. For an 11:30 a.m. start, the tournament didn’t get over until 10 p.m.

My first response to that is — glad it was her and not me.

My second is, that’s just too dang long.

Collegiate tennis coach Dave Hawley agreed.

“It was just so bizarre,” Hawley said. “The weird thing is, I don’t know how they could have run it any quicker. They had only four courts, there were 16 matches and a lot went long. It was kind of crazy.”

Another part of the issue is that the move to regionals and sub-states for Class 4A and 3-2-1A was supposed to shorten the day for all those teams.
With the way the regional system worked in the past, 10-11 teams would be at one site, so it took for-ever and some kids ended up playing five matches in one day.
With regionals this year, there were 5-6 teams at each site on Thursday, and then the individuals and doubles teams advanced to Saturday’s sub-states.

“There are two problems,” Hawley said. “Unless you have a lot of courts, you still have a long day. The bigger conflict is you wind up playing some of the same people you played on Thursday.”