The Ball State Cardinals will head out on a three-match road trip that starts at Akron today at 2 p.m. The matchup with the Zips will also mark the start of the MAC season for the Cardinals. After suffering two losses last weekend in Chicago, the Cardinals are looking to recover this weekend.
'We"re just hoping to get off to the right start in conference play. We"re really trying to bounce back from last weekend's defeats,' coach Kathy Bull said. 'No extra encouragement is really needed after last week, but it"s a conference play, and that always pumps us up.'
The Cardinals will move from Akron to Buffalo on Saturday and non-MAC Youngstown State on Sunday before returning home. Still, Bull isn"t looking too far ahead.
'When you have three matches, you have to take one at a time,' she said. 'There is nothing more important right now than taking care of the (Akron) Zips.'
While most of the time the MAC tennis season doesn"t begin until March, Bull is glad to get an early start.
'The nice thing is we play two conference matches and then have three weeks until we have to go back,' she said. 'We can take three weeks off and worry about it at the end of March again.'
While road games are not a new thing for the Cardinals, Bull said that this weekend is different.
'I tell you one thing: We"re traveling by minibus. We're not driving,' she said. 'We have the whole team together on one bus instead of in two vans. We have more relaxation, more team time together. This is the first time in my 16-year career here we"ve done that.'
After falling to 3-3 last weekend in Chicago, the team has spent the last weekend practicing to prepare for its longest road trip of the season.
'Well, one of the things we got to do, we"ve got to establish ourselves early in the point,' Bull said. 'Our opponents come out and really assert themselves in the beginning, hitting wider and harder, and we need a couple balls to get into it. We"ve worked with different targets and forced to hit deeper and wider. That"s our primary goal tomorrow, to be more controlling.'
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