Final Draw Results

HOUSTON - The Louisiana Tech tennis team started off slow, but finished strong with seven wins out of eight matches on the final day of the Solinco Houston Open this past weekend at the John E. Hoff Courts in Houston, Texas.

The tournament was the first of the fall season for LA Tech with six Lady Techsters seeing action in four singles flights and two doubles flights against the likes of SMU, Rice, McNeese State and host Houston.

"The progression is what I was most proud of," said head coach Chad Camper. "We started off slow, but later on we started making shots and winning points. The doubles got cleaned up from the first day which I was happy to see. Overall, we executed and ended the weekend playing better than we played all of last spring."

Day one was rain-shortened with only the doubles flights finishing. The duo of Alexandra Starkova and Manoela Chiacchio were 8-1 winners over Lamar in flight one.

There was plenty of action on day two to play catch-up in singles. The highlight of the day for LA Tech was in flight one where two Techsters advanced to the semifinals with victories. Starkova bested SFA's Denise Maxl, 6-4, 6-1, and Jazmin Britos outlasted Houston's Rocio Martin in a third-set tiebreaker, 3-6, 6-1, 10-4.

Both later suffered losses to SMU, but instead of playing each other in the final round the matches were swapped where they took on the other person's Mustang opponent. In those matches, both Starkova and Britos came up with two more impressive wins - Starkova overcoming two match points to down Yana Erkeeva, 6-3, 4-6, 13-11, and Britos ran away from Hristina Dishkova with a 6-1, 6-4 straight-sets win.

On day three, freshmen Haley Ballinger and Taylor Capannolo picked up their first victories while playing in flight four singles, both defeating opponents from St. Edwards.

The hard work put in for doubles during practice leading up to the event paid off on day three as well with all three tandems coming out on the winning end.

Next up for LA Tech is another trip back to Houston where they will be participating in the Rice Invitational from Sept. 26-28.

For complete coverage of LA Tech Tennis, please follow @LATechTEN on Twitter or visit the official home of Louisiana Tech Athletics at www.LATechSports.com.