Welcome Back!

Dear Wonderful Fans,

I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas break! This goes without saying, but DWT is tremendously grateful for your support thus far and we hope that you are as ready as we are for a much-anticipated season. Similarly to last season, this blog will serve as a weekly update for you and will provide you with some “insider” information about our team. But, more importantly, I hope that this will be a means by which you get to know this year’s team a little better. As I’m sure you know, we have four new additions to the team this year— Annie Mulholland, Beatrice Capra, Ester Goldfeld and Monica Turewitz. My hope is that you get to know each one of these special girls for their off-court personalities as much as for their on- court, beastly selves by the end of this semester.

A brief recap from the end of last semester: we had the opportunity to participate in a very rewarding, team bonding experience by reaching out to the Durham community. We visited The Girls Club mentoring program where we gave a brief presentation in which we introduced ourselves and talked about the value of teamwork and how this is applicable to one’s life outside the athletic world. After this, we presented each of the 25, excited children with their own Babolat rackets. This experience was not only beneficial to the children but it made us realize how important it is to use our privileged positions as Duke student-athletes to help and inspire the less fortunate. Additionally, the presentation forced us to reflect on the value of teamwork and the meaning of being a good teammate, which will be tremendously important in defining our successes this semester.

Back to this semester: This weekend, we had the opportunity to play some great matches at the UNLV Invitational as a prelude to the dual match season. I think that each of us now has a better understanding of the things that we need to work on personally this week as we move towards our first dual match. Off-court, this was the first time in Vegas for a lot of us and we had the opportunity to explore the crazy casino world (without actually participating obviously). While the slot machines are the usual attraction in this part of the country, our pyramidal-shaped Luxor hotel provided us with enough areas of exploration. Hanna’s mathematical mind could not get enough of the diagonal path of the inclinators as opposed to the normal up/down movement of elevators. Other attractions included dining at various lavish restaurants and losing ourselves in the AMAZING four-story M&M World. Oh, and obviously we spent a lot of time relating our experiences to the wild adventures depicted in “The Hangover” movie.

This weekend we will embark on our dual match journey with a match against William and Mary on Friday at 5PM and a match against Indiana on Sunday at noon. I know that we are extremely excited and ready to prove to you and to ourselves that we can reach our goal of winning this year’s NCAA Championship. However, every journey begins with a single step and we realize that we have a lot of work ahead of us to achieve this goal.

Please come out and support us and BE LOUD (tennis is a LOUD sport)!

GO DUKE!

Yours in tennis,

Monica Gorny and the rest of DWT.