The Kansas tennis team brought its first victory to its newly named Jayhawk Tennis Facility against the University of Missouri-Kansas City Kangaroos. The Jayhawks won 7-0.

They swept doubles, only dropping seven games overall, in three matches.

“It definitely builds up your self-esteem,” said coach Amy Hall-Holt. “Bouncing back and winning against UMKC showed a lot of character of our girls. They had a lot of energy and a lot of fight out there, and it was a good UMKC team.”

Freshman Sara Lazarevic and sophomore Erin Wilbert, the No. 1 doubles team, started their set winning five straight games. They hit a snag and switched off the next four sets before winning 8-3 on a volley by Wilbert. It was their first match together.

“I was a little nervous because I wanted to show Coach that we can do this,” Wilbert said. “It wasn’t exactly difficult. It was just closing it out it was like, ‘We can do this. We just have to put it into play.’”

Though this was Lazarevic and Wilbert’s first time in competition together, they are no strangers off the court.

“We are roommates, and she is one of my best friends here so we get along really well, and we communicate really well, and I think we make a good team,” Wilbert said. “I hope we get to play more together in the future.”

Wilbert also found success in singles, where she did not drop a single game in either set to win 6-0, 6-0 at the No. 5 spot.

“I don’t like being on the last court down there, so I try to get it done as fast as possible,” Wilbert said. “She just kind of hit balls back and forth, so I just came in and tried to finish the points.”

In singles, the Jayhawks saw some trouble, but they dropped only one set before winning all six singles matches. Senior Kuni Dorn lost her first set, but she came back to win the second and force a third set into a tie breaker.

“I was down the second set 6-5, so I was really close to losing, but my heart was there, so I was fighting,” Dorn said.

Dorn was the final match to finish on the day, and the team had officially won before she went into the tiebreaker.

“I was kind of nervous,” Dorn said. “I was calm because we had already won, so it is not a bad thing, but it feels good that I won.”

Dorn finished the match winning 3-6, 7-6 (2), 10-4. Hall-Holt was impressed with Dorn’s effort fighting through her match.

“Kuni has been struggling a little bit with parts of her game,” Hall-Holt said. “But I think definitely by fighting back and bouncing back from losing the first set shows a lot of character on her part, and I think her bouncing back as a senior and wanting this match is going to keep getting better from here on out.”

The Jayhawks improved to 4-0 in the series with UMKC under Hall-Holt and 2-1 on the spring season overall.

The Jayhawks have a double-header on Sunday facing University of Iowa at 10 a.m. and the University of South Dakota at 3 p.m. at the Jayhawk Tennis Facility.

— Edited by Anna Archibald