Thursday, July 12

SQUASH, professional women’s doubles tournament and pro-am begin, Elmaleh-Stanton courts, Southampton Recreation Center, from 2 p.m., through Sunday morning.

VOLLEYBALL, beach league round-robin games, Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, from 6 p.m.

Friday, July 13

PADDLEBOARDING, clinic by Jamie Mitchell, 10-time winner of Molokai crossing, and sports nutritionist Adam Kelinson, Surf Lodge, Montauk, 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

SQUASH, professional women’s doubles tournament continues, Elmaleh-Stanton courts, Southampton Recreation Center, from 10 a.m.

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, playoffs begin, games at 7:15 and 8:30 p.m., Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Saturday, July 14

SQUASH, professional women’s doubles tournament continues, Elmaleh-Stanton courts, Southampton Recreation Center, from 10 a.m.

Sunday, July 15

SPRINT TRIATHLON, one-half mile swim, 14-mile bike, and 5K trail run, East Lake Drive, Montauk, 7 a.m.

PADDLEBOARDING, clinic with Jamie Mitchell, 10-time Molokai crossing winner, and sports nutritionist Adam Kelinson, Surf Lodge, Montauk, 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

SQUASH, professional women’s doubles championship finals, time to be announced.

Monday, July 16

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, playoffs continue, games at 7:15 and 8:30 p.m, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Wednesday, July 18

LITTLE LEAGUE, game two of District 36’s 10-11-year-old girls softball best-of-three final series, Riverhead vs. East Hampton, Pantigo Fields, 5:30 p.m.

MEN’S SOCCER, Tuxpan vs. Bateman Painting, 6:30 p.m., Maidstone Market vs. Tortorella Pools, 7:25, and Espo’s vs. 75 Main, 8:20, Herrick Park, East Hampton.

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, playoffs continue, games at 7:15 and 8:30 p.m., Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

   Play has begun in a 4-on-4 beach volleyball league contested by 11 teams on the beach at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk every Thursday evening, Kathy McGeehan, the longtime coach of East Hampton High School’s girls volleyball team, announced this week.

    McGeehan, sidelined at the moment because of meniscus surgery, is the league’s director. Gurney’s, Smart Water, and the Diplomatico Rum Company are the sponsors. There are teams from East Hampton, Montauk, and Shelter Island, and the players range in age from 15 to 50, she said, adding that the competition is keen.

    Last Thursday was the first night; the round-robin matches go from 6 p.m. until dark. In first place, with a 6-0 record by the end of the evening, was a team of lifeguards sponsored by Sloppy Tuna — Marta Johann, Peter Johann, Andrew Foglia, David Carman, Katie Osiecki, and Garner Minetree. Air & Speed (Kim Valverde, John Foley, Jon Jamet, Dylan Cucci, and Dan Weaver) were in second, at 5-1.

    Among the other competitors are Chris Carney, Jesse Libath, Josh Brussell, L.B. Lownes, Matt Lownes, Carley Seekamp, Jenna Budd, Katie Brierley, Jack Behan, Calli Stavola, Todd Carberry, and Melanie Mackin.

    “It’s fun for spectators,” said McGeehan. “We’ve got a D.J. and a bar. . . . We’ll play through Aug. 23.”

    In other volleyball news, the girls coach said that “recently our whole team went to a four-day camp at Penn State, and Katie Brierley [a sophomore] and Christina Cangiolosi [a junior] were selected to attend the G.E.V.A. [Garden Empire Volleyball Association] high-performance camp from July 14 to 17. Twelve of the 24 girls from that camp will be picked to play in the high-performance national championships.”

    Sayed Selim, an Egyptian-born squash pro who once coached that country’s national women’s team, and who, after beginning to build a junior program at the Southampton Recreation Center, left in the fall of 2010 to teach at the Pyramid Squash Club in Tuckahoe, N.Y., recently returned here, intent on taking up where he’d left off.

    “I don’t want you to take a picture of me smiling this time, for I’m serious,” said the personable pro during a conversation at the Elmaleh-Stanton courts Sunday. “We are going to get the Squash Academy [an after-school mentoring program for East End youth who might not otherwise be introduced to the fast-paced racket sport] this fall, and we’ll have school leagues for sure. . . . I had 70 kids playing when I left; there were only four when I came back two months ago. . . . I am so happy to be back. I feel at home in the Hamptons.”

    In the past year and a half, Selim said, he had coached promising juniors at the Pyramid Club, including Cameron Munn, fifth-ranked in the United States among the under-13 girls; Ryan Murray, the world’s number-one in the under-16s; Olivia Robinson, the United States’ under-11 champion, and the top-ranked under-11 boy in the U.S., Morgan Huberman. “The Pyramid Club gave me a good chance to work with really good kids.”

    He is here full time in the summer, giving lessons and overseeing camps. In the off-season, he will divide his time between New York City and S.Y.S., coaching here on the weekends.

    A $20,000 women’s professional doubles tournament and pro-am that is to help raise money for the Southampton squash program is to be held at the Elmaleh-Stanton courts from today through Sunday morning. Admission to the tourney will be free.

    Speaking of touring pros, Selim said he still intends, provided a permit is granted by Southampton Village, to hold a professional squash tournament, “probably for men,” in a plexiglass court at Southampton’s Lake Agawam next summer. “And I also want to have the world junior championships here in 2014.”

    On another subject, politics in his native land, which he said has been for periods throughout the years under colonial rule — including that of the British, who brought with them the sport of squash — Selim said he was happy that Hosni Mubarak had yielded dictatorial power, and hopeful that the present army-controlled government would soon give way, without shedding more blood, so that democracy could continue apace.

    “My idol, Ahmad Harara, one of the young revolutionaries, who has lost the sight in both his eyes, has said he’d rather have no sight and be free than to be able to see and be oppressed. . . . The government we have now is not good, but anything’s better than Mubarak. I think we can go forward. I hope peacefully.”

    Shawn Pollard, a graduate student in physics at the State University at Stony Brook, won Sunday’s Firecracker 8K (4.97-mile) road race in Southampton in 27 minutes and 51.1 seconds, a time that probably would have been quicker, the winner said later, had he not attended a bachelor party the night before.

    Pollard’s pace that pretty — though hot — morning was 5:37 per mile. On a flat track, he said, in reply to a question, he could run “a 4:30-something.”

    The 27-year-old winner, a native of Oregon who lives in Port Jefferson Station, and who had stayed up until 4 a.m., dueled with Richard Temerian, 53, the eventual runner-up, through the first half of the race, but began to pull away thereafter. He’s looking to do a marathon, and his prospects are good inasmuch as he’s run a half-marathon in 1:10.47.

    The discovery of the Higgs boson, he said, in parting, had been very exciting. “I have friends who have been working on that . . . . Hopefully, it’s just the beginning.”

    Tara Farrell, 33, of East Quogue, who works at a Gubbins Running Ahead store in Southampton, and who looked very fit, was the women’s winner — and sixth over all — in 30:49.4. The mother of a 3-year-old son and a 19-month-old daughter, Farrell said she’d been hoping to beat 30 minutes, “but it was hot.” The absence of Caroline Birnbaum, a frequent winner of Southampton races — “sometimes outright,” she said  — opened the way for her.

    Asked how she would have fared had Barbara Gubbins — who was working — been at the starting line that morning, Farrell demurred. “She’s my boss,” she said with a laugh.

    Not far behind Farrell — in 13th place in 33:07.8, a 6:41 pace — was 14-year-old Erik Engstrom of Springs, from whom Kevin Barry, East Hampton High School’s boys cross-country coach, expects great things come the fall, even though he’ll only be a freshman.

    It was Engstrom’s first time at the Firecracker 8K, and while he liked it that the course was fast and flat, the heat bothered him a bit.

    He’s been training with about a dozen others every Monday and Wednesday evenings at the high school track with John Conner, a former top national age-group competitor in the half-mile and mile.

    His son, who easily topped the boys 10-to-14 division that day, had begun running as a way of training for motocross races, Erik’s father, Gerard, who also races motocross bikes, said. “He was always really fast, and he never got tired!”

    “He still races at Yaphank,” the elder Engstrom said. “In fact his bike’s on the back of the car. We’re going to Yaphank after this.”

    Paul Maidment, of East Hampton, who placed 46th in 37:50.0 and was third in the men’s 60-to-64 group, said the heat had gotten to him too. “I’m a typical European — I don’t like it,” he said. “There’s not much shade on the course and the sun can be damning.”

    His time, he said, in answer to a question, was “okay . . . heat-adjusted, I’m satisfied.”

    There were 315 finishers. Among the top age-group placewinners were Jason Hancock, a 38-year-old Southamptoner who teaches at the Amagansett School, who topped the men’s 35-39 division with his 30:28.3, good for fifth over all;

Arthur Nealon (42:13.5), who won the 65-69 division; Blaire Stauffer, 79, who led the 70-79s with his 46:16.2, and Julie Ratner, 65, of East Hampton, the founder of Ellen’s Run, who placed second in the women’s 65-69 group in 1:11:31.28.

   Before Monday night’s clash between the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league’s top two teams, the defending-champion Schenck Fuels and CfAR, a team without a sponsor that has adopted the Citizens for Access Rights logo, about 15 minutes was spent filling in a deep hole in shallow center field so that fielders would not risk injury.

    That bit of deferred maintenance — it took three or four full buckets of dirt from the woods abutting the field to fill it — could serve as an apt metaphor for this season: The slow-pitch league, which once numbered 14 teams in two divisions, has fallen on hard times.

    There are only five teams now, and one, as aforesaid, has anted up what a sponsor normally would pay; the scoreboard — or its control board — doesn’t work; the game had to be stopped in the top of the fourth inning until some softballs, fouled off either onto Abraham’s Path or into the woods off the right-field line, could be hunted down, and nobody knows quite why this decline in what used to be a buoyant local pastime has occurred.

    “Be sure to say we want more teams,” Ray Wojtusiak, CfAR’s player-manager, said at the end of the game, which his team had won 12-11, thus clinching the pennant and the top seed in the playoffs, which are to begin at the Terry King ball field tomorrow night.

    “Five teams — horrible,” the Fuelmen’s manager, Rich Tuthill, said before the game began. “I’ve never seen it like this. . . . I don’t know what it is.”

    Rich Schneider, the league’s longtime spokesman and one of its umpires, said he didn’t know the cause, either. An aging population? More enthusiasm on the part of young people for lacrosse, soccer, surfing? Less leisure time because of the demands of summer work? Rising fees, the result of costs passed on by a bud­get-paring town government? Or all of the above.

    At any rate, onto the game, which was, as slow-pitch softball goes, a good one, not a blowout.

    CfAR, the visitors that night, jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the top of the first on a bases-loaded two-out, two-run single by Brian Pfund, the team’s sixth hitter. Schenck’s got one back in the bottom of the second, which Jerry Uribe led off with a triple to right. The next batter, Beau Lawler, drove him in with a hot shot up the middle that almost took the pitcher Rob Nicoletti’s foot off.

    A two-out, two-run home run well over the right-field fence by Vinnie Alversa made it 3-2 Schenck’s in the bottom of the third, but CfAR wrested the lead back, at 4-3, with a two-run shot over the left-field fence by Chris Pfund in the top of the fourth.

    An unearned run traced to an error by Andy Tuthill, who was playing short in place of Adam Gledhill that night, treated CfAR to a 5-3 lead in the top of the fifth, but the defending champions once again went up by one in their half of the inning thanks to a two-run single by Tuthill and a sacrifice fly by Brendan Fennel that made it 6-5 Schenck’s.

    Neither team scored in the sixth, but CfAR made tracks with seven runs — all unearned — in the top of the seventh. Doug Dickson, the Fuelmen’s veteran pitcher, bobbled a soft comebacker hit his way by Nick Jarboe to begin the denouement, and after Marco Serra lined out to Lawler at third, Schenck’s third baseman threw wide of second base in going for a forceout there after fielding a grounder by Nicoletti.

    Then the floodgates opened. Wojtusiak tied the score with a line single to left, Diego Palomo drove in two more with a base hit up the middle, Bill Collins followed with a scorching r.b.i. single off Lawler’s glove, and Andrew Foglia, the cleanup batter, whom Dickson had held in check till then, striking him out in the first, inducing him to pop out to short in the third, and getting him to hit into a force play at second in the fifth, poled a monster three-run shot into the parking lot behind the left-field fence for a 12-6 CfAR lead.

    It seemed as if Schenck’s was finished, but they came back with five runs of their own in their last at-bat — the big hits being a bases-loaded run-scoring single by Alversa, a three-run triple by Fennel that got by Palomo in right-center, and a two-out r.b.i. single by Lawler — falling just short at 12-11, as aforesaid.

    The big win improved Wojtusiak’s team to 10-1 with one game to play in the regular season, and dropped Schenck Fuels to 8-3, also with one game left.

    CfAR had defeated the Fuelmen 18-13 in their first meeting, on May 30. Schenck’s evened the series on June 20, stonewalling the Access Rightists 22-11. Monday’s was the rubber game.

    All five teams are to participate in the double-elimination playoffs, which are to begin tomorrow with the second seed versus the fifth seed, and with the third seed versus the fourth seed. The winners are to play a best-of-three semifinal series beginning Monday. In the lower bracket, the top seed, which is to receive a first-round bye, will play the upper bracket’s lower-seeded loser Monday and the higher-seeded loser Wednesday. Should the top seed be upset in either of its lower-bracket contests, a semifinal game would be played Friday, July 20.

    A best-of-five final will determine the playoff championship. The same playoff format, said Schneider, will be used by the women’s league.

   Having just swum a mile in Gardiner’s Bay Saturday morning as part of a Swim Across America cancer-research fund-raising event, Arnie Paster, a 68-year-old Southamptoner who had raised more than $15,000 on his own, said to the scores of participants and volunteers assembled around him, “We’re all going to die. But we don’t have to die of cancer. What we’re doing today will have a great effect.”

    Wendy Tarlow, who, with Tom Hand, a former Montauk Rugby player, and about 60 other Tarlow-Hand teammates, had raised upward of $70,000 for Swim Across America in recent weeks, had made a similar point earlier that morning.

    “Today,” Tarlow said, “these teams [nine had banners up on the edge of the beach at the end of Fresh Pond Road] have raised $175,000 — just for this one event. But they could be having fund-raisers the year round. I’m going to be working with them in the coming year on that. Our team did a fund-raiser recently at B. Smith’s which raised from $6,500 to $7,000. Michelle [DelGiorno’s] karate students did a kick-a-thon [at Epic Martial Arts in Sag Harbor] which raised $6,500. . . .”

    There was hope, she said. Research had been yielding promising results, though that work, such as is being done at the Swim Across America lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, required more vigorous backing. She would have been swimming that day had she not undergone an operation 10 days before. Instead, the Sag Harborite, who has been in and out of the hospital because of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for the past two years, waded out into the water so she could greet every one of the some 170 swimmers as they came in from having swum half-mile, mile, or 5K legs in the placid bay.

    Rod McClave, a triathlete and long-distance swimmer who lives part time in Water Mill, and who won the 5K, said he’d lost five friends to cancer in the past year, “three of them under 40. . . . It’s been shocking . . . one after another. So, this event has great meaning for me.”

    Sinead FitzGibbon, an Irish-born physical therapist who won among the women in the 5K, and who is a member of Team Tarlow-Hand, said on emerging from the water, “This is one of the most important sports events on the East End. There’s a rare sense of community here. We’re doing it for the sport, which can be likened to moving meditation, and for the spirit.”

    Swimming was interesting too, she said, because, with the purging of wasteful motion one could more efficiently and thus more swiftly glide through the water. “It’s sort of a metaphor for life,” she said with a smile.

    Tom Hand, who has lived for the past 11 years in Gainesville, Fla., where his fellow firemen, he said, have been of great assistance to him as he’s confronted a rare form of cancer that has spread from the adrenal gland, said, when asked to recount his athletic career here, “I played with Montauk when it was fourth in the nation in 1998, and I played slow-pitch softball in East Hampton and modified-pitch in Sag Harbor with Sag Harbor Liquors, Billy Schmitz’s team. I’ve got a lot of friends here, and you know how it is when you’re at a funeral and everyone says, ‘We ought to get together sometime. . . .’ That’s why we’re having a social clambake and barbecue at Long Beach tomorrow evening. We want everyone to come from all the towns out here. People should get together. Why wait until something bad happens?”

    Later, after the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad, which had worked with Duncan Darrow’s Fighting Chance organization in Sag Harbor and with Swim Across America’s Don Regan and Gerry Oakley to bring the Hamptons Swim here three years ago, had been duly thanked, and after Arnie Paster had spoken, Hand, with his thumb raised, asked everyone not to forget to “live every day like it’s your last.”

Weekend Events

    There will be two sporting events of note here this weekend — Swim Across America’s long-distance Hamptons Swim races in Gardiner’s Bay, a fund-raiser for cancer research, which are to be held, from 6 to 10 a.m., at Fresh Pond Beach in Amagansett, and the Firecracker 8K road race, whose start-finish line is across the street from Lake Agawam Park in Southampton, at 8:30 a.m. Sunday.

    Rod McClave’s winning time in last year’s Hamptons Swim’s 5K race, 43 minutes and 31 seconds, prompted Gerry Oakes, a Swim Across America board member and chairman of its Nassau-Suffolk committee, to say that “45 minutes for a 5K would be the time of a 20-year-old Olympian. A masters swimmer [McClave is 37], somebody in good shape in his 30s or 40s, would swim a 5K in around an hour and 15 minutes.”

Squash Pros

    Wally Glennon announced this week that the top 16 female professional squash doubles players in the world are to play in a $20,000 tournament at the Elmaleh-Stanton courts at the Southampton Recreation Center from next Thursday through the morning of July 15, a Sunday. There will also be a pro-am, he said, that is to benefit the Southampton Squash program, “a not-for-profit corporation whose mission is to provide access to the game of squash to all members of the Hamptons community.” Admission to the tourney is free.

    In other S.Y.S. squash news, Sayed Selim, the Egyptian-born pro who was succeeded for a spell at S.Y.S. by Mike Weston, has returned. Glennon said Selim is here full time in the summer, and, in the off-season, coaches during the week in New York City and during the weekends at S.Y.S.

Saturday, July 7

SWIM ACROSS AMERICA, half-mile, one-mile, and 5K races in Gardiner’s Bay, Fresh Pond Beach, Amagansett, 6-10 a.m.

Sunday, July 8

RUNNING, Firecracker 8K, Lake Agawam Park, Southampton, 8:30 a.m.

    The Stony Hill Stables Foundation’s fund-raiser Saturday exceeded its $20,000 goal, Maureen Bluedorn was happy to report Tuesday morning before children’s pony and horse camps began.

    Thus the foundation is on its way toward awarding eight riding scholarships — apparently a “first” here — to promising applicants with a desire to improve their skills.

    The first scholarship award, worth about $5,000 when instruction and leasing are taken into account, was announced at the fund-raiser. It went to 10-year-old Lara Lowlicht, an East Hampton fifth grader, “who met all of our criteria,” said Bluedorn. “She’s a straight-A student, plays lacrosse, sings in the school choir, has some riding ability, and has the desire and the need.”

    Thus Lara, who had been taking one lesson a week during the past month, is now to be taught every day throughout the summer on her “favorite pony,” Wizard, whom the scholarship enables her to lease.

    Moreover, the Tack Shop in Amagansett has, according to Bluedorn, donated “a complete outfit for her when she shows.”

    During a brief conversation Tuesday morning before taking Wizard out of the stable into the short-stirrup ring for an evaluation by Stony Hill’s office manager, Roiya Doyle, Lara said she’d “like to be an equestrian, like Wick,” referring to Stony Hill’s owner, Wick Hotchkiss, a dressage silver and bronze medalist, who is happy to have her and her mother’s dream of offering riding scholarships realized.

    To fully fund eight scholarships — two each in the stables’ four levels, ranging from short stirrup to dressage — around $100,000 will be needed, said Bluedorn, though the initial fund-raising success, she added, has spurred the foundation board’s hopes.

    Aisha Ali-Duyck, a full-time trainer at Stony Hill who also shows in dressage competitions, and who as a former working student at Stony Hill knows how valuable these scholarships can be, said in an article on these pages last week, “I’m hoping the children who get involved with the foundation have that same experience I had.”

    Dahlia Aman, who recently swept through the Empire State Games senior division in tennis without losing a game, qualifying for next summer’s national tournament in Cleveland, played volleyball when growing up in the Philippines and didn’t begin playing tennis until she moved to the United States in 1973.

    “I wish I had learned when I was younger,” said the 5-foot-1-inch dynamo, with a laugh. “I would have been traveling.”

    Chances are she would have indeed, for Aman, whose husband, George, is a life master bridge player, and a frequent hitting partner, has won myriad matches over the years, in United States Tennis Association and club tournaments, since taking the game up. There are, she said, trophies “in the garage . . . inside, all over the place . . . medals too.”

    Moreover, she had learned on her own, “by reading Tennis Magazine and watching people play,” starting off in Syracuse, where she met her husband, who, from 1984 until his recent retirement, administered schools in Riverhead, Longwood, Amagansett, and East Hampton (The Ross School). He is soon to become the president of the East Hampton School Board.

    “I was looking for volleyball in Syracuse,” she said, “but I didn’t find it.”

    She did, however, find her primary avocation and her husband — on indoor tennis courts there. Asked if they had hit it off from the start, the interviewee, who was wearing a dark black print dress and a jaunty red cap, said, with another laugh, “Oh no, I didn’t like him! But I’m glad he persisted — I almost missed the opportunity. He courted me for six years. It was a good thing that it wasn’t love at first sight; I wanted to know him very well, and I wanted him to know me very well. We have been together now for 28 years.”

    Did she play bridge? “Oh no, I don’t play bridge — tennis is enough. . . . He teaches people every day, including members of the Devon Yacht Club. He’s been there for 13 years.”

    When asked about Aman’s tennis game, one of her hitting partners, Barbara Mueller, said, “She’s incredibly disciplined, focused, and smart on the court. . . . She gets everything! She’s one of those people who, when she decides to do something, does it 100 percent.”

    Aman (pronounced Ahmin) found no tennis in Riverhead either, though she did find it at what used to be the Hamptons Athletic Club — now Sportime — in Quogue. “I took no lessons — I just played. After I won a championship, they threw me in the pool. I didn’t know how to swim. My husband had to jump in and save me. I won five [women’s A] tournaments there in a row, and 12 in a row at Westhampton Beach Tennis and Sport. Then I got pregnant. Then I won again. And then I stopped because people started hating me. You can tell — they get really tired of you.”

    On moving here, when Dr. Aman was named the Amagansett School’s superintendent, she won numerous tournaments at Green Hollow, Buckskill, Sag Harbor, on the North Fork, and at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Tennis Club, where her elder son, Dennis Ferrando, whom she started off at the age of 6, is a teaching pro.

    While she used to play in 10 tourneys a summer and was at one time the top-ranked player in the eastern region, competing in U.S.T.A. events all over Long Island and upstate, she has let up a bit in recent years, playing three times a week and competing in two to three tournaments in the summer.

    When cramps forced her to withdraw from a tournament at E.H.I.T., she promised herself, she said, that she would stop whenever that happened again. “It took me two weeks to recover that time . . . I wasn’t even losing when it happened.”

    The heat, she said, had forced her to withdraw from the national senior division tournament in Louisville, Ky., six years ago, and from the nationals in Houston, Tex., last year. “At Louis­ville, I won the first set 6-0, but I had to stop in the second set because of cramps — it was 98 degrees and very humid. In Houston, I got to the final, but I couldn’t play because of the heat. I made a good showing though, even though I didn’t win it.”

    Tennis, she has said, is her sport, not her life. She spends much time fund-raising for Filipino-American groups — one of which, the Phil-Am Social Club of the Hamptons, she founded in 2005 — that have helped tsunami victims and donate regularly to such organizations as Doctors Without Borders, Ronald McDonald House, and the United Service Organization, Inc., the U.S.O.

    She supplements her tennis with workouts at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter and at the East Hampton Gym, and does Pilates core-strengthening exercises and yoga at home. “I walk every day also. . . . I don’t run on treadmills — I don’t want to hurt my knees.”

    Asked if there was any area of her game that needed improving, she said, “No, I don’t think so.”

    She has her rackets strung loosely, at 45 pounds, which enables her to hit with power, “though I play with control too. . . . I’m thinking all the time, but not too much! I’ll lob, work you around. If you give me a short ball, I can hit it for a winner. I know I’m known for getting everything back, but I’m more of an offensive player now.”

    As for surfaces, “I like Har-Tru the most, then grass, then hard courts. We played on hard courts at Cortland, but I didn’t find them troublesome.”

    There is no national tournament this year; they’re played every two years. “Winning at the Empire State Games qualified me to play in Cleveland next summer. I want to win that, and then stop. That’s my goal.”