Wareham girls tennis swings for success as season progresses
Julianna Frye serves during a home game against Old Rochester on May 1. Photos by Grace Roche
Yvonne Pina-Monteiro prepares to serve. 
Malia O'Connor reaches for an incoming ball. 
Jooly Salem runs toward the net. 
A Wareham player stretches to hit an overhead ball. 
Pina-Monteiro looks down court. 
Salem stays ready for her next hit. 
Wareham and Old Rochester players chat at the net. 
Malia O'Connor returns a hit. 
Salem and O'Connor during a doubles match.
Julianna Frye serves during a home game against Old Rochester on May 1. Photos by Grace Roche
Yvonne Pina-Monteiro prepares to serve.
Malia O'Connor reaches for an incoming ball.
Jooly Salem runs toward the net.
A Wareham player stretches to hit an overhead ball.
Pina-Monteiro looks down court.
Salem stays ready for her next hit.
Wareham and Old Rochester players chat at the net.
Malia O'Connor returns a hit.
Salem and O'Connor during a doubles match.
For the Wareham High School girls tennis team, its underclassmen-heavy lineup is a strength.
Coach Geoff Swett and co-captains Julianna Frye and Nevaeh Smith agreed a team with no seniors only means room for growth and consistency as the group develops.
Frye, a junior, said while other teams will lose their graduating seniors next year, Wareham won’t face the same loss.
“I feel like our strength ties in with our age, it’s going to help us in the end and better us, because we still have a lot of time left,” fellow junior Smith said.
She added the team is growing together as a group, and have become closer since the time many of them joined as freshmen.
Swett said getting a tennis team to feel cohesive can sometimes be difficult, since it's played in solitary or paired matches. Without the rest of the team on the court, he said he has to make an effort to build the group into a strong team.
“It's that much more difficult to get people to feel like they're part of a team, because they don't play together most of the time,” he said. “That's part of what, as a coach, I try to work on.”
The captains also play a role in that feeling of unity.
Smith said she tries to keep “everything in-line,” ensure players have fun, and has a “positive, strong attitude and make sure everybody does the same.”
“A lot of these people on the team look up to us, especially because we're not seniors, but we are upperclassmen,” Frye said. “It's in our hands to set the tone, the dynamic of the team. I think we're doing that pretty good this year.”
Their coach said the players’ strengths this season lie in their belief in themselves, ability to show good sportsmanship after both defeats and victories, and friendliness towards each other.
He said the young team is still growing, but uses its matches against surrounding schools as a metric for growth. Whether looking at individual performance of team-wide results, he said the goal is always to improve.
“When you lose to a team, and then the next time you play them you beat them, that's always very satisfying, because you've grown during the season faster than they have,” Swett said. “We definitely would like to do that.”
