The Milwaukee women's tennis team will play for the first time in 2023 this weekend, hosting a doubleheader against Hillsdale Sunday at River Glen Elite.
 
The Panthers and the Chargers, who hail from Hillsdale, Michigan, will get underway with a 1 p.m. start. River Glen Elite, the home of MKE Tennis, is located at 2001 Good Hope Road in Milwaukee (53209), a half-mile west of I-43 between River Hills & Glendale.
 
Hopes are high this spring for the Panthers and first-year head coach Ryan Kucera, after the team claimed a best-ever runner-up finish at the Horizon League Championships last year. The squad fell to No. 2 Youngstown State in a heartbreaker of a championship match, 4-3, after knocking off top-seeded Cleveland State in the semifinal round.
 
Kucera comes to Milwaukee after two years at Minnesota State University, Mankato, earning Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Coach of the Year honors last season following a very successful campaign on the courts. He led the Mavericks to a 16-10 record, which included an 8-3 ledger in NSIC play. In the process, he guided the program to the largest single-season turnaround in conference history, going from 11^th place to third place in just one year.
 
SCOUTING THE OPPONENT
Sunday's match will be the first between the two in program history. Hillsdale is an NCAA Division II program that went 8-10 overall last season, including a 4-3 mark in Great Midwest Athletic Conference (GMAC) action. First-year head coach Liam Fraboulet comes to Hillsdale after multiple stops as an assistant coach, most recently with the NCAA Division I Coastal Carolina men's tennis team for the 2021 season, where he helped the Chanticleers to a .500 record and a fourth-place finish in the competitive Sun Belt Conference.
 
ROSTER MAKEUP
The current roster comes from an extensive background of seven different countries and will consist of a pair of Panther veteran returners in Anika Tylek and Iva Stejskalova, as well as second-year players Babette Burgersdijk and Giorgia Cavestro. Newcomers include Nadiia Konieva, Anouk Ma-Ajong, Alice Shields, and Sara Simonova.
 
Tylek is in her fourth season with the Panthers, having recorded 14 wins in singles and seven in doubles last year. Stejskalova is in her third year at MKE and posted a team-high 16 doubles victories last season as well as seven in singles play.
 
Milwaukee did lose a couple of key pieces to graduation, including Horizon League First-Team honoree Mayya Perova, who capped off her senior season with a career best 19-8 overall record in singles and tallied 15 more victories in doubles. Perova recorded a 10-match win streak during the season, while competing primarily from the No. 2 singles line (13-4) but also went 6-1 from the No. 1 position. She graduated as the winningest doubles player (win percentage) in program history at .722, going 70-27 in her career.
 
FALL FESTIVITES
This fall, Milwaukee competed in five different tournaments, visiting Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan, in addition to an event in-state. Shields went 10-4 to pace the Panthers in singles victories during the fall slate, while Shields and Konieva both went 9-6 to top doubles action.
 
Milwaukee has been picked to finish sixth in the league this season in a poll of the league's coaches, despite that very strong finish to their campaign a year ago. The Panthers finished 3-3 last spring and went into the Horizon League Tournament as the No. 4 seed. Youngstown State was the selection to win the league crown.
 
HOME SWEET HOME
The Panthers have been stellar at home of late, going 23-11 over the past four years, including a 10-3 mark in 2021. Last season, MKE claimed victories in three of its final four home duals heading into the postseason.
 
UP NEXT
The Panthers hit the road next weekend, visiting Miami (Ohio) Saturday and Dayton Sunday.