While the Rice Lake Warriors girls tennis team graduated seven starters from its varsity lineup, coach Maite Oyarbide-Sanchez remains optimistic about the team’s depth as a new season gets underway. Players vying for varsity positions last year are a year more experienced and ready to step up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“What we are blessed about this year and are really excited about, is we feel like we have a deeper team this year,” said Oyarbide-Sanchez, who’s in her eighth season as head coach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rice Lake was 1-6 in Big Rivers matches last season but went 9-10 overall. The Warriors had two doubles teams reach sectionals and one qualify for state, but all four athletes from those two doubles teams graduated. Captains for the team this season are seniors Maddie Yeager, Haley Seelow and Audriana Schultz, although Schultz, who played at No. 1 singles last year, will miss the season due to injury.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeager returns after playing in the No. 2 spot for singles where she had a 6-17 record in her first season of varsity. Seelow was in her first season of tennis last year and as part of the Warriors’ No. 3 doubles team in which she went 10-11.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Three others are back for the Warriors who had a few varsity matches last season in juniors Hailey Sadowski, Josephine Garcia-Rodriguez and Jasmine Mackewicz. Combined that trio played in 12 varsity matches, going 6-6.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We had what we called the bubble,” said Oyarbide Sanchez. “The bubble group was the upper JV \u2014 we were trying to figure out who would be three doubles and because we did so much rotating, quite a few of those top JV players also got to play varsity.”<\/p>\n
Much of the team’s depth this season comes from younger siblings of previous varsity players. While Yeager’s older sister Hannah was on the team two seasons ago, five girls on this year’s team are younger siblings of last year’s senior class. Garcia-Rodriguez’s sister Miranda was a team captain last year, with Stefani Husak and Morgan Seifert’s sisters Halle and Karlee were the doubles team that reached state in 2025. Londyn Boehme is another player who could compete for playing time and is a younger sister to Eva, who was a senior last season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What makes the Warriors’ coach optimistic for the season is the work put in by the players over the offseason. The captains organized weekly open tennis nights and many players were at the courts hitting 3-4 times per week. The coaching staff felt the players were ahead of schedule. Instead of working more on skills for the first few days of practice, they were able to have challenge matches to see the athletes in competition settings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I feel like we have the athletes who have got the motivation to do well,” said Oyarbide-Sanchez.<\/p>\n
Rice Lake opens the season Tuesday at a tournament in Amery against the host team, along with Superior and Unity. Friday and Saturday the Warriors are at Altoona, with Barron, Bloomer, Chippewa Falls, East Troy, Mondovi, and Eau Claire Regis also in attendance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rice Lake is first on its home courts Aug. 28 against Barron, and Sept. 1 the Warriors host Menomonie to open Big Rivers play.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While the Rice Lake Warriors girls tennis team graduated seven starters from its varsity lineup, coach Maite Oyarbide-Sanchez…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17989,17987,19730,17991,50,17912,28,17990,10600,3220,17988],"class_list":["post-52789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-amateur-sports","tag-multi-sport-clubs","tag-rice-lake","tag-school-sport","tag-sports","tag-student-sports-organizations","tag-tennis","tag-university-and-college-sports-clubs-and-teams","tag-varsity-team","tag-wisconsin","tag-youth-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}