The Forester women's tennis team was edged out 5-4 by host Carthage College Sunday morning and fell 8-1 to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the 25th-ranked team in the nation, in the afternoon. Lake Forest sophomores Sarah Paulson and Christi Valicenti knocked off a pair of regionally-ranked doubles teams on the day.
Trailing 4-3 to Carthage's #1 doubles team, Paulson and Valicenti won five of the next six games to take the match 8-5 and give the visitors a 2-1 lead going into singles play. Sophomore Grace Dowling and freshman Lexi Chionis had earned the Foresters' first point of the match with a 9-7 triumph at #2.
After the Lady Reds prevailed at #5 and #6 singles, Paulson finished off a 6-0, 6-3 victory at #1 to tie the match at three. The home team won at #3 but Lake Forest tied the score again on a 6-3, 6-2 triumph by Chionis at #4. Carthage then won at #3 to take the match.
After defeating the eighth-ranked doubles team in the Central Region in the morning Paulson and Valicenti defeated the fourth-ranked team from Whitewater 8-6 in the afternoon. The duo finished 2013-14 with a 12-1 record at #1 doubles, the highest winning percentage by a doubles team in program history.
The win at the top spot in the doubles lineup provided the Foresters their only point of the match and kept their team record victory total at 17 against just five losses.
Several individual players on the team also put their name among the program's all-time leaders. Chionis led the squad with 19 singles victories, which ranks second in team history behind Valicenti's 21 from last year. Valicenti's team-high 19 doubles wins ranks third in school history, as does her 18 victories at #1 doubles. She also moved into seventh place in team annals with 40 doubles victories in her career. Valicenti won a dozen times in 2013-14 with Paulson as her partner and they tied for seventh in program history in victories in a season by a doubles team and third by a duo at the top spot in the lineup.
The team will lose just two players, Elina Shapiro and Lucy-George Cooper, to graduation next month.
