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By Justin Curto

As the ball rushes toward him, junior Parker Billings prepares to return it to his singles opponent at the tennis dual against Kansas City Christian Thursday, April 7. The Jaguars lost the dual, which consisted of three doubles matches and six singles matches.

The boys tennis team lost its dual to Kansas City Christian on Thursday, April 7, winning two out of six singles matches and one out of three doubles matches.

According to head coach Eric Ammerman, the results weren’t the best representation of the team’s performance because there were so few matches.

“They had, they only have six guys on the team at [Kansas City] Christian, and we have 32,” Ammerman said. “So, they only brought six, and normally a dual would be much bigger than that. So that was not a whole lot to judge from, not a large sample size. Because they only brought six, their coach and I tried to kind of match up the level of the people.”

Senior Jordan Wootton believes the team did poorly in large part due to wind conditions at the dual.

“I feel as a team we could have done better, however, the wind was a factor we weren’t used to,” Wootton said. “It was strong and unpredictable.”

Juniors Parker Billings and Jansen McCabe, senior Patrick Gambill and sophomore Eric Schulz lost their singles matches. Wootton and sophomore Landon Butler won their singles matches 8-4 and 8-1, respectively. The doubles teams of juniors Andrew Bock and Alec Bergeron, as well as Schulz and Butler, lost their matches. The doubles team of Gambill and Wootton won its match 8-5.

Despite the team’s overall loss, Wootton felt good about his performance.

“I feel like I played well,” Wootton said. “There were mistakes all around. However, my matches came out favorable.”

Ammerman is looking forward to the rest of the season, and wants the team to do well at regionals and state.

“I definitely want to get [six players] to qualify for state, and that’s a pretty lower-tier goal because I think that should be pretty easy for us,” Ammerman said. “But, I really want to win regionals, and I think we should. I think some other teams are going to make that really tough, but I think we can do it. The primary goal leading up to that is winning matches against our regional opponents. But along the way, [I’d like to] have fun, get to know our teammates better, that kind of stuff. That’s always the first goal.”