Today at 5 p.m., the girls tennis team will host the sectional championship, where they will face Franklin. The team swept Whiteland & Greenwood en route to their appearance in the final, looking for their first sectional title since 2021.
With two confidence boosting wins, the Trojans hope to continue their momentum against Franklin today.
“I feel like we’re going into it with a lot of momentum,” junior Sloane Small said. “We beat Whiteland 5-0 and obviously we won right now, so I feel like we’re going into it with a lot of momentum, and knowing that we won 4-1 last time we played [Franklin] is also going to boost us.”
Winning the championship would mark the first piece of hardware for players.
“Obviously all my years of high school I haven’t been able to get out of sectionals yet, so this will be my first time. It would be really exciting. Obviously going into regionals is really exciting,” Small said.
Over the past three years, Franklin has knocked out Center Grove in the sectional final. However, this year carries the hope of being different.
“It definitely makes me mad, because I don’t like them to be honest,” senior Ashley Embrey said. “It just makes us really want it more than the other seasons too, because we can show that we can actually beat them and get to regionals. That’s super big, and especially after we lost a bunch of seniors last year, it’s super big to show them that we can still keep up and win.”
Something that makes the Trojans different this year, according to assistant coach Grace Culver, is their determination more than their skill.
“They definitely have a lot of drive to beat Franklin and they have the mentality of ‘We’re going to get past Sectionals this year, whether we like it or not’ So, they have a lot of motivation and they’ve been working really hard throughout the season to accomplish that,” Culver said.
An interesting matchup to watch will be Small’s duel against Franklin’s No.1 singles player, Marnie Moore, who played with Small over the summer.
“They’ve kind of had a rivalry over the past few years and during the off season they practice together and they play together,” Culver said. “They work together and then they come out and try to beat each other in a really important match, so I’m really excited to see how that one turns out. I think Sloane’s going to do really well.”
A key to a repeat of the Trojans’ regular season win against Franklin will be staying consistent and clean, as they have throughout the playoffs, especially in the doubles matchups.
“We just need to be super active at the net, angle low shots and not let them get easy shots back,” Embrey, who plays doubles, said. “If we can, I think we can stay more consistent than them. Just staying positive, staying loud and getting the rest of the team loud.”
Ranked No. 17 going into the postseason, the Trojans could let the ranking define them, but for Small, it’s less of an indicator of the skill of the team, and more of a reflection of early-season rust that has since been knocked off.
“I feel like we could have been ranked a bit higher up. Our schedule was really tough, and I feel like especially throughout the season we’ve had line-up changes, so I feel right now we aren’t the team we started as. I definitely feel like we would be ranked higher if we had our current lineup earlier,” Small said.
