SMC women's tennis serves up St. Patrick's Day massacre against Bakersfield
Santa Monica, who came into the match having lost two-straight games against Western Conference rivals Santa Barbara and Glendale accordingly, showed no mercy while crushing the winless Bakersfield team.
At the very start of singles, it was apparent that the Renegades were in for a long and miserable ride, as both Izabel Nazdracheva and Lauren Voiers of the Corsairs were caught literally walking through their motions.
Voiers, who stands tall at 5'11 and is known for her oft nonchalant style of play, found no difficulty as she silently defeated her Bakersfield opponent, Amorita Gonzalez, 6-1, 6-0.
Izabel Nazdracheva, or Naz, as she is so known around Santa Monica's campus, looked to have been jogging through practice drills. It seemed to have no effect on her as she defeated Jessica Arreola, 6-0, 6-1.
So with single's competition dwindling and the pacific sky becoming more overcast, everyone present - especially the Renegades, were hoping, and maybe waiting for something miraculous to happen.
Unfortunately though, the time never came.
No rainbows appeared, because the sky grew more cloudy and no leprechauns showed up, which may have been because under their red t-shirts Bakersfield forgot to wear green.
So as women's doubles began, the Renegade's troubles only got worse.
For some reason, Bakersfield's issue became not that of being unlucky, but as a collective they continuously failed to get the ball over the net.
The Corsairs though, who knew that they'd be going home with another W, made a habit of making lazy errors. Shawntel Patterson, who usually serves the tiny green ball with razor-sharp precision, seemed to have mis-served quite often as she underestimated her opponents.
Nevertheless, as she paired up with Izabel Nazdracheva, Patterson's confidence remained high while she humbly served nonreturnable balls.
During doubles the entire tennis area was dead in silence. There was no cheering - from either teams, there were minimal screeches of pivoting tennis shoes that one would hear in a competitive match, and for some reason one could actually hear the wind.
It was odd.
And while all of this was going on, Bakersfield never ceased to knock the ball out of the park, literally. Within 10 minutes of double's matches, somewhere close to five balls could be seen flying over the 30-foot-tall cage at Ocean View Park.
One by one several Corsairs went to retrieve the balls, but sadly none came back with gold.
And if it weren't unfortunate enough for the Renegades, toward the end of the match they lost all traces of confidence, forgetting to even return the ball.
After the game Corsair head coach Richard Goldenson, wearing a long sleeve avocado-green shirt underneath his royal blue corsair jersey said, "[Bakersfield] has improved a lot since the last time we faced them."
The Corsairs defeated the Renegades 9-0 back in February.
The Corsairs next match comes tomorrow, March 19th at 1:00 pm, at home against the 6-6 Ventura College Pirates. The weather report says that highs will be 71 degrees, so keep your fingers crossed and hope that it is smooth sailing for the Corsairs.