PaliHi Girls Tennis Team Looks to Take Title Leap this Season

The season is underway for the Palisades High girls tennis team as it works towards winning the City Section playoffs, a year after falling short to Granada Hills in the finals.

One of the biggest challenges for Sean Passan, who is entering his sixth season coaching varsity and seventh overall at PaliHi, will be finding the right combinations for his doubles teams. The four-person lineup is set in singles, but beyond that things are cloudy.

Katie Pfannkuche and Melody Wilkenfeld’s departures left Passan scrambling to make his new lineups work, aside from his number-one tandem, senior Julie Takakjian and sophomore Madeline Prins.

“We got a little shaken up in doubles,” Passan said. “The key is finding experienced doubles players. There are things to consider – for example, players can only play on the left-hand or right-hand side for the entire season, and you can never predict how people play under stress.”

Passan’s roster is a deep one despite having just three seniors – Takakjian, Katie Vincent and Lauren Sedmak. Vincent will be the Dolphins’ number two singles player behind junior Diana Silvers, while sophomore Morgan Swan will be No. 3. That part of the lineup is not giving the coach any concern.

With doubles, Passan experimented with several different lineups in the season’s opening week, including junior captain Izzy Guterson and junior Alexandra Kugler, and two USTA players in freshman Abigail Schleichkorn and sophomore Elizabeth Belokonnyi.

Last season, the Dolphins came up short in the City finals on a rainy day against Granada Hills, 4-3, with Wilkenfeld and Kugler dropping the decisive doubles match.

“It’s not just City finals we want to get to and win,” Passan said. “If Granada Hills is the team we play, so be it, but everybody wants to win that championship. We weren’t upset with last year’s results because we got every single player qualified in individuals. We felt like we were a good team but just had a bad day in the City finals.”

Passan also mentioned the Southern California Regionals as a primary goal for his team in 2013, something it achieved last season when it picked up 2.5 points against the elite Palos Verdes Peninsula team following City finals.

“We ended up playing one of the really good teams,” Passan recalled. “On paper it didn’t look too good, but we almost had them. Going in there it looked like we would get zero points, but that wasn’t the case. It was a good end to our season because it showed we can take on a really difficult team.”

After their season opening loss at Beverly Hills last Tuesday, which Passan said ranked as one of the toughest matches on the schedule along with Mira Costa, the Dolphins played at Fairfax on Tuesday. Today, they host Westchester in their home opener at the Palisades Recreation Center at 2:30 p.m. before traveling to LACES on Tuesday.