Park girls tennis: Briggs, Lindstrom earn win over Mounds View, but Wolfpack falls

The long matches and near wins this week against Mounds View and Roseville prove that while Park girls tennis has upgraded its athleticism from last year, it hasn’t been able to mentally will itself to win a match against tough opponents.

The 6-1 loss against Mounds View on Tuesday shows improvement from last year’s match where we only “won a handful of games,” according to coach Sean Kangrga. The win, from third doubles team Malorie Briggs and Carolyn Lindstrom, demonstrates that teams like Mounds View aren’t impervious to Park tennis.

Briggs and Lindstrom persevered in a close match, winning the super tiebreaker after going one and one in the first two sets. Although there were no other Park wins, “one, two, and three doubles were all pretty competitive,” said Kangrga.

“They were tough. They were too good for us in singles,” he continued, adding that, “One through three singles [for Mounds View] are in the top ten in the state.” The formidable skill brought by Mounds View athletes was simply too much for Park’s singles.

Park tennis saw identical results in its match against Roseville on Thursday, but the numbers don’t tell a full story; Kangrga believes the team played much better this year than last.

In their 6-1 loss to Roseville, number four singles player Nicole Laabs grabbed the only win, taking the first set 7-6, losing the second 6-7, and winning the super tiebreaker for the match.

Second and third singles and the number one doubles team also played close matches but were unable to scrape together any wins.

Briggs and Lindstrom brought their number two doubles match to a tight second set after losing the first 6-1. “[They were] down 5-2 in the second and got it back for the tie-breaker . . . they competed really hard,” said Kangrga. But it wasn’t enough to win the match; after many long points the team lost the second set at a painfully close 7-6.

Next week brings another round of difficult matches, against White Bear and Hastings. The team has proven capable of competing against tough opponents, but Kangrga thinks they can take that a bit further this week, and “get in close matches . . . start believing we can win.”

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