Athletes participate in successful spring tennis program

Spring Tennis was quite the season for weather! Lots of rain and snow made us practice indoors more than normal but the kids did great and we worked on the things we could inside on the gymnasium floor without us having an actual tennis court.

Our high school team played in Casper against Natrona County and Kelly Walsh; in Gillette against Thunder Basin and Campbell County; and in Cheyenne against Central, East, Laramie, Rock Springs, and Rawlins. We also did a back and forth with Rock Springs on good weather days.

Our season started off with us headed to the University of Wyoming to watch the Cowgirls play against San Diego State in Division 1 tennis. This is always a great day for our kids to see what college tennis looks like and see if it is something they would like to pursue. When the matches concluded we played Laramie.

All of our high school matches were played using a round robin format to get the kids playing as many points against as many people as possible. We had 44 high school players come out consistently this spring.

Some student highlights would be our freshman boys Dylan Archibald, Jonathan Myers and Tanner Hokanson who came out, played a lot of tennis, got to play some upper division talent this spring and got some wins against last fall's varsity members on other teams. Jake Nielsen, a sophomore boy, also got some good matches in.

We had a lot of girls come out and play tennis this spring! Some highlights were from Grace Gomez, Jocelyn Peterson and Kayla Worden, who stepped up and played some very good tennis. Kayla is a sophomore who is great at being a positive teammate and encouraging others and her game is coming along. We are looking forward to having them this fall and getting them out this summer to hit a lot of tennis balls. Their fall season really begins in the spring and summer if they want to make noise at Regionals and State. 

We started a Junior High Tennis Program at Lincoln Middle School three years ago and have seen it continually grow each year. Now when these kids get to high school they have a couple years under their belt where they know the game and can get competitive quicker. We have had between 40-60 students in middle school play each spring, and this spring our number was 48 who consistently played. We as coaches recognized it as an opportunity to get our high school program more competitive, and it also gives students something to get active in if they don't do other sports in the spring at LMS. (This is a non-paid program that we provide to a lot of students.) We ran it for five weeks and then held a big intra-squad dual that 42 players participated in.

Doubles Results Top 8 (20 teams)

1st: Rylin Arnell (7th)/Nixon Frey (8th)

2nd: Sydney Lopez (8th)/Brynley Beutel (8th)

3rd: Lucas Arnold (6th)/Kaiden Olson (6th)

4th: Jacoby Bundy (8th)/ Dell Lyon (8th)

5th: Taylor Kendall (8th)/Elizabeth Newey (8th)

6th: Annistyn Nielsen (6th)/Maggie P (6th)

7th: Blaise Taylor (8th)/Damien Roper (8th)

8th: Lucas Hokanson (7th)/Kyler Steiss (7th)

Singles Top 4 (Out of 8)

1st: Rylin Arnell (7th grade)

2nd: Brynley Beutel (8th grade)

3rd: Sydney Lopez (8th grade)

4th: Jacoby Bundy (8th grade)