Huskies Edged 4-3 In Battle With No. 16 Florida State

Friday, January 17

Honolulu, HI

12:00 PM

University of Washington

Florida State

January 17, 2020 | Women's Tennis

Box Score

HONOLULU, Hawaii --- Washington battled hard in its first match against a ranked opponent this season, but was narrowly defeated 4-3 by No. 16 Florida State in a match played at the University of Hawaii Tennis Complex on Friday afternoon.

The 14th-ranked Huskies (4-1) stood strong with the Seminoles (1-0) from start to finish with the match coming down to a pair of contests in singles. However, the breaks did not go the way of Washington, which suffered its first defeat of the year in a wet and windy match in Hawaii.

"Today was exactly what we thought it would be - a battle until the end and a great college tennis match," said UW Head Coach Robin Stephenson. "We competed well and handled the conditions well and just came up a few points short of getting the win. Credit to Florida State, they played a very good match and were a little better than us today in the key moments. We will be a better team through this experience and I am so glad we had this opportunity early on in our season. We will learn and get better and we are all looking forward to what will be an exciting season."

Doubles play opened with Florida State winning 6-0 at No. 2 doubles before Vanessa Wong and Natsuho Arakawa pulled out a 6-3 win at No. 1 to even things up. However, despite battling back from a 5-2 deficit at No. 3, Zoey Weil and Nika Zupancic were unable to complete the comeback as the Seminoles held on for the 6-4 win and the doubles point.

Florida State won the first singles match at No. 5, but Sedona Gallagher continued to roll in 2020 with a 6-4, 6-2 win at No. 4 singles to make it 2-1. The Seminoles won another at No. 3 singles, but Wong kept the Huskies in it with a hard-fought 7-6 (4), 6-4 win at No. 1.

The match came down to courts two and six with both matches going to three sets. On court six, Weil battled back from a 6-0 loss in the first set to force a third with a 6-4 win in the second. However, despite battling back and forth throughout the third, Weil would fall 6-4 as the Seminoles clinched the match. On court two, Arakawa won the first set 6-2, but lost the second 6-4. In the third set, Arakawa trailed 6-5 late in the contest before tying things up and forcing a tiebreaker. Florida State's Salas would rally back from a 4-1 deficit to tie it up, but Arakawa scored the final three points to win.

Washington has a bit of a break before returning to action next weekend, hosting the ITA Kick-Off Weekend for the first time in program history. The Huskies open the tournament by hosting Princeton in the first round Saturday at 2:00 p.m., right after USC and Kentucky do battle at 11:00 a.m. The winners of those two matches play Sunday at 2:00 p.m. with a trip to the ITA National Team Indoor Championship in February in Chicago on the line.

"We have a few things to clean up in practice this week and need to be better with and we will make sure we are prepared for Princeton next Saturday," said Stephenson. "We are excited to be hosting Kick-Off and being back on our home courts. This team will be exciting to watch and hopefully we can have a great home crowd next weekend."

Admission to the Kick-Off Weekend matches is free with all matches contested at the Nordstrom Tennis Center.