Walter Johnson girls’ tennis has started out strong this season with a record of 7-1. So far they have beaten Bullis 5-2, Paint Branch 6-1, Einstein 6-1, Blair 6-1, Whitman 4-3, Damascus 7-0 and Richard Montgomery 4-3 and lost to The Potomac School 3-4.

It looks as though this fall season will mirror last year’s as the team has already gotten off to a great start. Last fall, the team finished the season as the fifth best team in the county with an overall record of 8-4. The team played in division 2 last year, but since they won the division title, this season they’ve moved up to division 1.

The team this year is different from last year’s successful team that had many county finals victories. The team captains this season are Stacey Ternovskaya, Nikki Emamian and Emily Martin, all juniors. It’s typically unusual for all of the captains to be juniors, but this year the team only has one senior.

The team lost four seniors last year when they graduated, but according to sophomore Isabelle Carlisle, the team found a lot of new talent in tryouts.

“We lost some of our singles players, but this year we also gained a lot of strong singles players, so it hasn’t been that huge of a loss, but obviously we miss them now that they’re away,” Carlisle said.

This season Coach Mitchell Duque wants to focus on improving the doubles teams as he already knows that the singles players will do very well in matches. Duque also wants to work on teamwork and help the players build strong relationships.

“I’ve talked to the captains early on, [and told them] let’s get some team building activities because it’s pretty much going to be the same team we have next year minus one player, so these girls need to get to know each other. Tennis is such an individual sport, so we wanted to make it a lot about the team this year,” Duque said.

Their next match is at 3:30 p.m. on September 22 against Wheaton High school.