Tennis Update, Our Condolences and Walz -- Tuesday Cardinal Couple

( JEFF MCADAMS DELIVERS THE TUESDAY EDITION OF CARDINAL COUPLE AND BRINGS US AN UPDATE ON MARK BECKHAM'S TENNIS TEAM AND THE SADNESS OF A TRAGEDY INVOLVING A WOMEN'S SPORTS SQUAD. )   

Tennis Results

The UofL Women's Tennis team spent the weekend in South Bend, IN at Notre Dame participating in the Notre Dame Invitational.  Results for this extremely young team were generally good.  The format of this event is not the same as a typical head-to-head competition between two teams.  Only four players competed for each team, compared with the typical 6 or 7, and each team competed in four singles matches and four doubles matches against opponents from various of the other five schools at the event.  A typical college tennis competition features three doubles matches and six singles matches.

The Cards showed steady improvement through the weekend across both singles and doubles matches each day.  Starting off with an average day on Friday...The Cards went 2-2 in both the singles matches and the doubles rounds.  Saturday saw an improvement to 3-1 in both singles and doubles.  Sunday didn't have any doubles competitions, but Mark Beckham's youngsters cleaned up the singles matches with an unblemished 4-0.

The other teams in the event were host Notre Dame, Akron, Illinois, Purdue, and Tulane

The Women's Tennis roster only has a single senior listed, Manuela Velasquez, with all of the rest of the players being freshmen and sophomores.  The four players that competed at Notre Dame were freshmen Ellie Gerlach and Aleksandra Mally, along with sophomores Olivia Boesing and the lone international player on the team, England's Elle Stokes.

Women's Tennis will continue their play in Indiana this coming weekend, October 3rd through 5th at Purdue in West Lafayette, IN.

North Central Texas College Softball

We mentioned, briefly, at the end of the Cardinal Couple Radio Show on Saturday the tragedy that occurred in southern Oklahoma to the North Central Texas College Softball team.  The team was returning from a scrimmage with Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma City when a semi truck crossed the median from northbound I-35 and impacted the driver's side of the passenger section of the NCTC team bus.  At air time, details were scarce, with the most important being that 4 people from the team bus had been killed.

The NTSB has a team in the area investigating, but the four dead have since been identified, and all were players on the team.  The four players were Meagan Richardson, Brooke Deckard, Katelynn Woodlee and Jaiden Pelton.  North Central Texas is a community college, so all of the team are freshmen and sophomores.  Of those killed, Katelynn Woodlee was a freshman, while the other three were sophomores.

There is no determination, as of yet, as to why the semi crossed the median into the oncoming lanes.

The thoughts of us here at The Cardinal Couple are with the families of these young women that were killed, as well as the rest of the NCTC community affected by this tragedy.

jmca

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EDITOR'S NOTE:

We get e-mails. A couple of days ago, they started rolling in about the possibility of Jeff Walz leaving Louisville to take the UT...or possibly some other job...

I think that Walz's tweet pretty well summed it up when he said he'd like to retire at UofL. In conversations with him...he always expresses a desire to make the program better each year. 

And, a million bucks a year can go a very long way in Louisville. 

Jeff Walz leaving Louisville? Yeah....to go recruit, ski, visit friends and family, coach USA squads,
watch his WNBA kids and attend away games. To take another job? The chances of that are just as likely as me being named his successor. Zero. I do expect him to get more involved in lawn care around 2025 or so. Maybe he'll let me operate the leaf blower. I got skills...

Paulie