Ithaca’s Shaw seeks undefeated season

It has been a strong season so far for the Ithaca High School girls tennis team, going 7-0 with only three individual matches lost this season out of the 49 that have been played. Senior Talia Shaw is the team’s top singles player and has handled the best competition around Section IV with a clean 5-0 record.

She’s doing so during her first year playing singles at the varsity level after two seasons of doubles play. That’s not an easy transition, and Shaw discussed how she’s been able to handle it.

“It’s a lot of determination,” Shaw said. “Making sure that you’re in the right headspace to play and keeping up with that self-talk during the matches is really important. Maybe a little bit of skill but not that much.”

The mental game has been the biggest adjustment for Shaw this season as she no longer has a teammate beside her. Shaw’s doubles success, with a record of 16-1, was a precursor to her singles success this year.

“The transition between it being only on you versus having it be a team sport was something really interesting,” Shaw said. “When you’re on a doubles team, you can’t let that second person down. I would say there’s another level of pressure when playing doubles because you feel like you want to play well with your partner. But I would say there’s also a different level of pressure during singles because it’s only up to you when you don’t have any help on the court.”

Shaw added that she feeds off the pressure of a singles match more due to that self-dependency. What’s added to that pressure lately is a nagging foot injury that has held her out of two matches this season. It did not slow her down on Friday though as she won her match against Johnson City while only dropping two games.

Playing first singles was not a role that Shaw anticipated jumping to after playing on the first doubles team last season, but she’s hit the ground running after a strong preseason performance.

“I feel like, at the end of last year, I was definitely not expecting to be at first singles this year,” Shaw said. “Some other seniors on our team this year were above me in the lineup last year. But it was the challenge matches that we do in the beginning of the season, which I won. That was important.”

Shaw is one of the captains of the team under head coach Matt Prokosch, who became the varsity head coach before the shortened spring season. Shaw talked about the first-year head coach.

“It was definitely a transition from our last coach just because they don’t really have the same style of coaching at all,” she said. “Mr. Prokosch gives us a lot of freedom in our playing. It’s less fine-tuning of our playing and more general. There’s more of how to react in specific situations, which I think is really interesting. There’s a lot of room for us captains to help him with a lot of the technical parts of the team and team-building, which has been really helpful for me because now I get a little bit of a view into being a captain for a sports team.”

As mentioned earlier, the entire team is off to a great start this season. There were no official sectional tournaments in the spring, so this success is promising with only a few matches left before the postseason begins. Shaw discussed the team’s success as a whole.

“We just have a lot of skill on the team,” she said. “Every single person on our team this year can play, and they’re really good players. As a team, we have a good amount of bonding. It’s a very supportive team environment, which is contrary to some of the other sports teams I’ve been on. Everybody gets along, and it’s just a lot of supporting each other, which I think is really important for success.”

Balancing her personal success with her role as a team captain has been something that Shaw has embraced this season.

“I would say they really go hand in hand,” Shaw said. “Once I’m supporting what I’m doing in the moment, it definitely leads to encouragement of others on the court as well. That energy has to be kept up high and maintained for me to maintain it for everybody else. Or maybe it’s really the opposite way and I maintain that energy for the rest of the team, and then it channels to me as well.”

It will be a busy stretch for Shaw and the Little Red with four matches closing out the regular season. That includes a match against Vestal and its 6-1 first singles player Rachel Rabkin on Saturday, Oct. 2, who Shaw expects to be her toughest opponent this season.