By Steve Bigham

The girls’ tennis team at Newtown High School has not exactly been winning a ton of matches this spring, but this young squad has shown vast improvement and may even be surprising itself.

“We’re winning games. We’re just not winning matches,” said coach Kathy Davey. “I think the kids realized that they were young going in and that they weren’t going to win that many matches. But honestly, I think they’ve surprised themselves that they are winning a lot of games.”

And a perfect example of that took place Monday afternoon at home against Immaculate. Newtown eventually lost the match, 5-2, but all the scores were close, particularly at first doubles where Kali Santarpia and Jackie Alpert finally succumbed in a nail biter. All three sets went to tiebreakers and the match finally ended just as darkness was falling.

“We started playing at 3:30 and didn’t get out of there until eight o’clock. It was a long day,” said Davey.

Senior-laden Masuk swept Newtown last Friday, but the ‘Hawks picked up their second win of the season April 25 against Jonathan Law, winning 6-1.

The scores:

Newtown  6, Jonathan Law 1

Singles: Kunkel (N) def Shannon Horsley 3-6, 6-2, 6-3; Caitlyn Martin (N) def Ashley Stach 6-0, 6-0; Pavelo (N) def Danielle Masek 6-3, 4-6, 6-3; Schnell (N) def Ashley Oppedisano 6-2, 6-1. Doubles: Naomi Kim/Rachel Stern (N) def Julia Dunn/Amanda Wilkenson 6-0, 6-2; Teresa Wetz/Christine Quinn (JL) def Alpert/Santarpia 7-5, 3-6, 6-3; Christina Andrews and Kim Allen (N) def Amy Wilhelm/Katrin Mandiolo 6-0, 6-2.