At the conclusion of last year’s Binghamton University women’s tennis season, former Pipe Dream staffer Chris Strub wrote about the Bearcats’ future: “The truth is that for a program that’s become a perennial contender and regional force, the two record-setting graduates are just the beginning.”
The record-setting athletes Strub was referring to, Zeynep Altinay and Lya Kushnirovich, graduated in the spring. With them, the Bearcats took a combined 312 match victories. The question for Binghamton coming into this season was how were the Bearcats going to replace their two superstars. Their answer has come emphatically from their two outstanding freshmen: Anna Edelman and Lauren Bates.
From a distance, Edelman and Bates would seem the most unlikely pairing. Edelman is the brash girl from Great Neck, Long Island while Bates the quiet upstate girl from Buffalo.
Their success on court, however, has been undeniable.
Bates and Edelman are a combined 27-9 in singles play. As a doubles team they boast a 15-2 record, which includes flight A championships in the Quinnipiac and Cornell Invitationals, a match win at Intercollegiate Tennis Association Regionals, and dual match wins over Army, Rutgers and Siena.
With dominant performances throughout the fall, Bates and Edelman have highlighted a successful Bearcats season and helped lessen the blow of losing Altinay and Kushnirovich. The Bearcats have a cumulative 80-54 record as a team as of Feb. 14. In some of their matches, notably their 7-0 victory over Siena on Oct. 6, Bates and Edelman have looked so sharp you would have forgotten that Altinay and Kushnirovich had even left.
For the liberal arts majors who hate anything and everything science related, you have admit that chemistry matters. The key to Bates and Edelman’s success has been their burgeoning friendship.
“Anna and I have a lot of fun on the court with each other,” Bates says. “We are good friends, so it makes tennis fun since I’m playing with someone I enjoy spending time with.”
“Being friends helps us play better with each other,” Edelman says. “We like being on the court with one another and we are happy to be playing together.”
Edelman and Bates get along well not only with each other, but also have great relationships with the rest of the team — a necessity to winning matches on the college level. With only seven women on the Bearcats — a typical tennis team has 10 or 11 players — Edelman and Bates know that having good chemistry and camaraderie can be the difference between winning or losing a dual match.
“We cheer a lot for one another. We sit on each other’s courts during matches, and being together as a team helps us all play better,” Edelman says.
Still, the duo acknowledges room for improvement. After all, for all their success as a team this year, the Bearcats have slumped recently; they have lost three consecutive duals to Army, Rutgers and Temple — the last two were 7-0 shutouts. Bates has tried to make sure that her teammates have not lost sight of their goals and what needs to be done to achieve them.
“The No. 1 goal is (winning the) conference,” she says. “We have to play more and work on our weaknesses. We all have things we can do individually to get better.”
Edelman and Bates have their priorities in the right places, and understand that in attempting to be successful student-athletes many athletes forget the word “student.” Performing well in the classroom is as much as a goal as winning the America East.
“We want a good GPA, and we want to be recognized for that by the department,” Edelman says.
Losing Altinay and Kushnirovich was a big blow for Binghamton’s women’s tennis team, and it was not even the team’s only loss. Just three players remain from last year’s roster: Sophomores Danyelle Shapiro and Erica Rosenblum and senior captain Gayathri Balasundar. With so many new faces, the Bearcats needed their freshmen this year to be ready to step in and deliver for them. But there is one thing they want to make clear.
“We’re not replacing Z and Lya,” Edelman says. “We are our own players and our own people. We are here to make our own records.”