Navy Sports Central

Not For Self: Breaking Down the Navy Women's Tennis Team's Championship Season

• Episode 66

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Today on Navy Sports Central, we celebrate the Navy Women's Tennis Team's exciting run to their first Patriot League Championship! Coach Keith Puryear sits down with us to share how the team laid the groundwork in the fall to put them in the best possible position to compete for the title in the spring. He'll also take us through the thrilling moments of Kate Lee's remarkable comeback against Boston University and the unwavering spirit of senior players Samantha Johns and Stella Ribaudo, who battled through their injuries all year long, but never wavered when it came to representing what Navy Women's Tennis was all about. 

Coach Puryear's candid reflections on these emotional highs and lows offer a powerful narrative of dedication and teamwork. This episode is a testament to the relentless spirit of Navy sports, filled with stories of triumph and unyielding determination.

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We want your answer to our Question of the Day. Here is the one for this episode:
What is the longest home match winning streak for the Navy Women's Tennis team in dual meets?
A. 11
B. 17
C. 20
D. 23

You can answer by sending us a text message using the link at the top of the show notes. I'll also post the question on our group Facebook Page.

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Music is provided courtesy of Audio Jungle. Artists featured in order:

  • Seven In Music (Intro)
  • Alexiaction (Deep Dive)
  • Loka Music (Question of the Day Lead In)
  • Cinematic Alex (Closeout Music)



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Karl:

Hi everybody. My name is Karl Darden and I'd like to welcome and thank all of you for joining us today on Navy Sports Central. I'm your host and this is the official podcast of the Navy Sports Nation where we take a deeper dive into Navy sports. We are getting close to the start of another college football season. The Mids will be reporting to camp on July 31st, with the first game against Bucknell coming up just a month later. So things should start falling into place over the next several weeks and you'll definitely want to be here for our deep dive segment. Our guests will be Navy women's tennis coach Keith Puryear, who led the Mids to their first Patriot League Championship this past April. All of that, plus our question of the day, is coming up, so please stay with us. All right, it is great to have you back for another episode of Navy Sports Central. Whether you are a regular listener or this is your first visit, thanks for taking the time.

Karl:

There's not a ton of stuff going on in the yard right now, except for the class of 2028 arriving for Plebe Summer about a month ago. Among them were 69 football players. Seven of them were listed as quarterbacks and, if you're curious about the position or positions that brought in the highest number of recruits. That would be the offensive line with 11. And next up were the safeties on defense, with six recruits there. But the one guy that got my attention was a fellow named Wayne Pritz. He is from Argyle, texas, which is about 30 miles north of Fort Worth. Pritz is a tight end who is listed at 6'7", 235 pounds. That makes him the tallest guy on the team, and since we know that coach Drew Kronick's new offense is looking to use tight ends more, pritz could make a good target if he's able to pick up the offense good enough to get on the field his first year. By the way, I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but the captains this season are fullback Daba Fofana and linebacker Colin Ramos. Fofana has rushed for over 1,100 yards in his career so far, while averaging a solid four yards per carry. Ramos led the team in tackles last season with 110, while racking up nearly 200 during his first three years at linebacker. So both of these guys are solid choices based on their accomplishments, and I'm looking forward to seeing the kind of impact they're going to have this year.

Karl:

Besides that, there's not much else happening around the yard, about. The only other thing that grabbed my attention this past week was the hiring of Steve Gladstone to become the coach of the heavyweight rowing team. He takes over for Rob Friedrich, who moved over to an in-house position with Navy Athletics. The interesting thing is that Gladstone had retired from Yale after a long and stellar career at five different universities. He also won 14 IRA championships along the way, and that ties him for the most in the history of the sport. Gladstone's biography also stated that he once coached the US national team and he was a selector for the 1972 Olympic team. I mean, clearly this guy is a legend. He's been involved with the sport for over 50 years, which only had me wondering what else does he have left to prove? So I reached out to my classmate, scott Gordon, who was a member of the heavyweight rowing team when we were at Annapolis, and he had a pretty interesting take that really made a lot of sense to me once I thought about it. It turns out that Coach Gladstone brought an assistant with him, named Matt Fleur. Fleur is actually a 2012 graduate of the Naval Academy who's been at Yale for the last two years, and he was also an assistant coach with the mids for a few years before that. Anyway, gordy told me that one possible strategy was to have Coach Gladstone lay the groundwork for a few years and then turn things over to Fleur, and I can definitely see that happening. Fleur is basically in his early 30s, so you know, thinking about that scenario, he could be in place for quite a long time at Navy. Thinking about that scenario, he could be in place for quite a long time at Navy. Okay, that pretty much does it for this update.

Karl:

Our deep dive segment is coming up next, so please stick with us as Coach Keith Puryear takes us through. The has spanned over three decades. Prior to arriving in Annapolis in 2008, he coached at the University of Maryland, baltimore County. For 19 seasons. Puryear has been the only coach the Navy Women's Tennis Program has ever known. It was a club sport when he first took over, and a year after that they began competing at the varsity level. Going into his 16th season as the head coach of the women's tennis team, puryear has racked up a very impressive 194 wins, while going 51-13 in conference play. His teams have always competed hard, both in and out of the Patriot League, year in and year out, and this season in particular turned out to be truly historic. So I'm extremely pleased to have Coach Keith Puryear join us today to talk about the MIDS championship season, including that exciting Patriot League final against Boston University. Coach Puryear, it is so great to have you here on Navy Sports Central. Thanks for taking the time.

Coach Puryear:

Yep. Thanks for having me, Carl.

Karl:

All right, let's go ahead and get right into it. I think that one of the things I wanted to go kind of set the stage for the whole discussion is to go back to the very beginning of the year. So last fall you've welcomed your team back, You've got a couple of seniors plus a good distribution of you know, freshmen, sophomores and juniors. What I'm curious about is how typical a breakdown across all the classes is that, and by that I mean just having two seniors. Is that a bit of an anomaly, or does it happen more often than some people might think?

Coach Puryear:

It's fluctuated a little bit since we've been to the academy. We were supposed to have three, but we had one young lady who chose not to play that year. So we did have three for most of the time which those guys were there, but sometimes a breakdown. It varies from year to year. We've had years of just a year before we only have one, one first class or one senior.

Karl:

Okay.

Coach Puryear:

The year before that we had three. So it is. It has fluctuated a little bit. It has been rare for us to have four seniors. It's normally been somewhere between two, two to three.

Karl:

Got it, got it Okay. So you welcomed them back. You're coming off a year where you got to the semifinals in the Patriot League Championships the previous year. What was your vision for success for this year's team, and how did you communicate that to your players?

Coach Puryear:

We really hadn't changed what our vision of success is. Each year, the goal is to try to get the most out of what we have on our team, that they really do the best job we can really um, just taking advantage of all the you know, all the talent that we have and doing it and doing the job there. And if I think we do the job there, then that end result sort of takes care of itself. And so that has been the message to them throughout. It will be the same message again this year. You know that we're going to go out, we're going to try to get the best out of what we have, each and every match, each and every practice, and and then simply let those uh, let those results take care, take care of themselves right right now along those lines.

Karl:

I noticed that, uh, you know tennis. I mean there's a couple you know rugby might be another one where they have a pretty lengthy fall season and then they take a break and go into the spring. Tennis is the same way where you have a lot of invitationals that you play in the fall, you take about a two month break and then you come back and start your head to head in the wintertime. Basically, you know they call it a spring sport but you basically are starting in February, but anyway, that's a lot of time with the breaks and everything. Even you know injuries kind of crop up and stuff. How do you keep the players engaged? What are some of the things that you can do to kind of keep them fresh, to avoid falling into? You know ruts at different times of the year.

Coach Puryear:

Yeah, yeah, well, I think you know part of it is just the structure of the academy. That does help just a little bit because during the summer months everyone's going to do a minimum of two training blocks during the summer. That helps a lot because that's a built-in sort of break for them. Where they're away from tennis At some other schools, the players they can go out and if they want to we call it grinding if they want to go out and they want to grind all summer long playing tournaments, they can do that. Our players aren't going to be doing that and so it's a nice built in break for them once they do come back.

Coach Puryear:

You know we go, we go, we start off and we go pretty, you know, pretty hard, as you said, and the season's pretty long. This year we'll start off in the middle part of August and then we'll go until November in terms of just our in-season part of the season, and then off-season we'll go from the beginning of November through that first part of December. So it is a pretty long fall season and what we try to do is we just try to work on that process of periodization, where you're going to work pretty hard early on to develop your base and then, once you have your base, then you're going to sort of break it down. You're going to break it down a little bit more, where you're looking at things strategically as opposed to technically, and we tell them all the time that any changes that we need to make, any tweaks that we need to make, you're going to need to make those in the fall, because once the spring rolls around, uh, the matches that get going, it is fast and furious, and so it's a little bit challenging even in the fall to uh to make those little changes because you still are competing.

Coach Puryear:

But you know, we always say you're going to make your mistakes. Make your mistakes in the fall, because once the spring rolls around, you know that's when, uh, that's when when things really matter. And so I think, just sort of looking at it that way, I think it really helps the players, you know, to understand that you're not going to, you know you're going to make your gains in the fall. That's where you really want to make your, you know, make any changes or make your tweaks in the fall. And so I think that helps a little bit and takes a little bit of the pressure off of them where they feel like they have to be perfect, so to speak. That's where they can make their mistakes.

Karl:

Right, right. So yeah, let's take a closer look at how those invitationals are set up. That format is a little different than when you have match play in the spring right it is. I've noticed that you have there's several flights and in fact you could have two of your players in the same flight. You know that sort of thing. So how does that structure help you do what you just mentioned in terms of just kind of tweaking, uh, everything in the fall to make sure you're ready to go in the spring?

Coach Puryear:

well, you do have some events that um will sometimes be be one and done, but it's rare and but you get. You get a lot of reps in the fall. So, for instance, when we play our event, if you lose in the first round, you go into the back draw so you have a chance to continue to play and do it over again In the spring semester. You could play a singles match on Saturday and, in win or lose, you might not play another singles match until the next week, and so that's where it can become just a little bit sort of like the snowball. If you feel like you're struggling a little bit, the snowball just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Coach Puryear:

Um, if you feel like you're struggling, as opposed to in the fall, you have a chance to sort of do it over again. Um, you know now, if you lose twice in some matches I mean some tournaments if, even if you lose twice, you just continue to play, you just continue to play and continue to play, depending upon how the tournament is structured. So you get a lot more reps in the fall, and so that's your opportunity. If you don't get it right the first time, you normally will have another match where you can go in and you can play. You can now work on that which you did not do. Uh, you felt you didn't do too well. You know the match before, sometimes even the same day, if not the next day I see okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Karl:

All right, so now let's go ahead and jump to. I've always been curious how you would plan for like a dual meet, okay. So what I want to do is just, let's just let's just go back to the. As you were preparing for the semifinal this year against Army, right, you and your staff are kind of getting together and you've just beaten Bucknell, I believe. Right, I mean, they were, yeah, that's right. So you're planning for Army. You've already taken them down once during the star match. There are known quantities, so to speak. So how did you prepare your players to go up against them? Or was it simply a case of OK, we know what we need to do, let's just go out there and do it.

Coach Puryear:

Well, it's always a little bit tricky because with the dual match format you don't find out exactly who's going to play where until you exchange lineups an hour before the match actually starts.

Coach Puryear:

And so if you go that whole week and you're assuming that you're going to be playing this person and all of a sudden the lineup comes out and they've changed and made some changes in their lineup, it can be a little bit offsetting, and so we really try to focus a little bit more on our part.

Coach Puryear:

We know generally how different players will play or will compete, their style of play, but we're really going to try to focus on things on our end because we don't have total control over what they're going to do, and so we really just try to take care of, you know, our part of the equation. You know make sure that mentally, you know we're prepared, you know we're prepared to go out to compete and we're ready for the challenge that that match is going to bring. Because anytime you play another service academy, particularly when it comes down to Army Navy, just the level of play, the competitiveness, the grit, the nerves, everything else that people are going to feel is going to be there, and so it's important that, mentally, our players are able to sort of understand what they're going to need to do in order to fight through some things, in order to be successful.

Karl:

All right, yeah, yeah. And, and, by the way, I've watched you know, whenever those matches take place, I always watch the video that Navy athletics puts together, and specifically the army one and the Patriot league champion. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but anyway, those were just really exciting to watch. So now you've, you've, you've beaten army. It was. It was a tough one, but, but you came through. And but you came through and won that one. And you got to go against Boston University, who has just like been a thorn in your side for years, right? Yes, really a top-notch program, yeah, so what did you feel? That the team's strengths were going into that match? Just keeping in mind the result that you had the last time, it was probably some good lessons you took away from that one, right?

Coach Puryear:

Yeah, when we played them in the regular season, we played them up there, we played them indoors and it was a fairly quick indoor facility. I thought we made some good adjustments, but it was something that was a little bit foreign to us in terms of just a level of comfort Coming back home knowing that we're going to be coming home, we're going to be playing, regardless of whether we play indoors or out, you know we're playing in our home base, someplace that we feel comfortable. That was going to add a different level to, you know, to the finals match. But I think the main thing was, all season long players did a really, really exemplary job of coming prepared to play every single match win or lose, it didn't really matter whether we won or we lost.

Coach Puryear:

Uh, we showed up and as easy to say but hard to do, right? Uh, where every single player you know pretty much one through six in singles, one through three and doubles, if they were in there, um, they gave you everything, gave us everything we had. We told them this before the match that if we went out, and we did that, regardless of what the scoreline was, we were okay with it. You might not believe me, but I told them when we talked, if we had lost that match and not that I wanted to lose it, mind you but if we had lost that match, I would have been upset more at myself, I would not have been upset with them, because they gave us everything they had. Kate lee, you know, she gave us everything, everything she had, I mean every single player, sia, sia, chaudry, same thing, everything she had. Michaela chain I mean everybody, win or lose, they did that and, uh, and I think that was the key to our success in that match, but that was also the key to our success that we had throughout the season.

Karl:

Right, right, and taking the point a little bit further, when we're talking about that match against Boston University, I mean there was a point there where things were looking pretty tough. I mean earlier, before Kate Lee's deciding match, michaela Chang, I believe. She lost the first set rather quickly but just pulled it together and just won the next two in pretty short order. So that got you the first singles point after having won the doubles point already, keeping in mind that you need four points total to win the match. Wait, wait, I don't think that's right, no, no, michaela.

Coach Puryear:

Chang won hurts pretty easily yes, right, one is straight sets. Um, it was kate kate lee. She lost. Now, she won the first set. They lost the second step pretty quickly and then sia, sia lost the first set and it came back and won the next two right, right.

Karl:

So I guess what I'm getting at here is you got, uh see, as a sophomore, kate's a junior, but but certainly Kate's got a little bit more experience and everything. But my my thing is going back to the mental toughness piece. You were talking about how much they just totally left it out there and they came to play all the time. Uh, when we think about things like mental toughness and being able to play quality tennis under pressure, um, what are some of the things that you discuss throughout the season when it comes to that sort of thing?

Coach Puryear:

Yeah, you know, I think we, you know we have some certain things that we do with them on court to help contribute to that on, you know, on a daily basis. I think it's just the focus and the concentration that you bring every single day that's going to help you. Is that sort of just doing it the right way and trying to do it the right way over and over and over again so that when those pressure moments come, you know you're not doing anything other than what you've done every single day? You know we have a great sports psych person who works with our team, dr Jessica Moeller, and she comes in, you know, wherever she can. She's very, very busy. She works with other teams as well as, as well as with the Baltimore Orioles.

Coach Puryear:

She did some work with the Baltimore Orioles last year as well, and she will come in and she will also sort of talk to the players. But I think with us it's just a matter of keeping the doors open, make sure that we're always, you know, sort of just conscious of the players, the pressures that they're feeling, you know sort of just conscious of the players, the pressures that they're feeling, and have them have an outlet or means to which express that. You know, in order to, in order to make those jumps they need to make mentally, which will then transpose to them what they're doing on the court physically.

Karl:

OK, all right, very good, I'll tell you what. We're going to go ahead and take a short break now, but before we do that, I did want to give you all a couple of ways to stay up to date on Navy sports. The first is to join the Navy Sports Nation group Facebook page. I've got a link to that in the show notes. Just click on it, answer a couple of questions and you'll be good to go. The second way takes even less time. Just hit the follow button on whichever platform you're listening to this podcast right now. It can be Apple Podcasts, spotify, iheartradio, it doesn't matter. Once you do that, every episode will be downloaded to your directory when it's released and you can listen to it whenever you're ready. So please consider becoming a member of our group and you can actually tap that follow button right now to show your support for the podcast. I'm looking forward to having you join us. We'll be right back. Thanks for staying with us here on Navy Sports Central.

Karl:

Karl Darden here with you, and today we are joined by Coach Keith Puryear of the Navy Women's Tennis Team, who earned their first Patriot League title this past spring. So, coach, let's go ahead and pick up where we left off, and that was with Kate Lee's match against her opponent from Boston University, which would decide the Patriot League championship. And for our listeners out there, let me just go ahead and set the table for you. As coach said, kate won the first set and that was by a score of 6-2. Then she lost the second 6-1. So now they head to a third set which winds up going to a tiebreaker, right. So now everything's on the line 12 point tiebreaker.

Karl:

First, one to seven by a margin of two, and you know they take home all the marbles. So before you know it, you know Kate's down five to one and she's got her two service points coming up. So what ended up happening there was, let's see, she won her service point. No, she won a point off the opponent serve to get her to five two. Then she wins both of her service points to get to five four, but then loses the next point. So now she's facing what we're talking? Three championship points there and two, two, I guess. And so what's going through your mind right there? And then I'm going to ask you in a couple of minutes, you know, after you give me this answer, I want to get a sense of your range of emotions in about a five minute span, or however long it took to get to you know.

Coach Puryear:

Yeah, well, I must add, though, she made a couple of comebacks because she also was down a break, you know, in the third. So she actually down for one um in the third set and then was able to get it back to uh, where she was actually up five, four, and then they went five all and then six all and then the tiebreaker, right, I think. With me we had video, and so sometimes you can sort of see me, if you ever see the video where I'm walking back and forth and I'm talking to her. I really tried to maintain, stay on even keel. You know, I couldn't get too up, I couldn't get too down, because you know she's going to, she's going to feel, you know, right. So so I just tried to try to stay there, and the thing I kept telling her was the same thing I had to do Stay the course, stay the course, stay the course. You know, don't worry about the scoreline, because the scoreline in tennis it's very, very, very deceptive.

Coach Puryear:

She's down 5-1, but that's not a huge. You know, that's not a huge lead. You know, it's just a couple points. You know you play two or three good points in a row. It's just a couple points, you play two or three good points in a row, and that was the main objective was just to continue to play good points. Win or lose, just play a good point. And so when she got to the match point, again that was her goal. It was just to try to play a good point and not worry so much about the end result, because if she did that and she lost a the point, then there's no more she could do. She did her job, but you just want to go out and just play the point the way the point was supposed to be played, and that was the.

Karl:

That was always a message to her throughout the whole match win or lose yeah, and I think the thing that was so impressive was that, you know, she fought off two match points and she won a couple more points to get to seven, six and then, and then, on her first opportunity to close out the match, it happened. So that was pretty fabulous. So now you see the ball go long on the baseline. You know, after that rally it goes long. And, by the way, props to her, because just in the short video that I could see, she was just so controlled I couldn't tell if she was winning or losing just by watching her expression, you know. But as soon as that ball bounced along, she just dropped her racket and just exploded. And so now tell me how you're feeling, considering just the history of the conference tournaments.

Coach Puryear:

Yeah, to be honest, it took a while for it to hit me, because I had to maintain this, you to maintain this pretty stoic demeanor all throughout. And again, if you watch the video initially, I'm sort of just standing almost like in a state of shock.

Coach Puryear:

And my associate head coach. She's jumping around and she does a complete 360. And then my assistant coach he's got his arms up in the air. Those guys, I mean immediately, they sort of reacted, but it took me a little bit, I just wanted to sort of take it all in. So I took it all in. And then the first person I went to look for was my wife, and she knows the sacrifices that have been made, that we've've made, our family has made, in order to, uh, to make this happen, in order to stay around and do something that you know I love to do, and so I shared a moment with her. And that's when, um, it really, really, really hit me and the tears started coming because she was crying, she was, she was, in fact, she was. She wasn't just crying, she was bawling and uh. And so we share a moment there. And then, uh, the next person was, uh, the athletic director right right who came up and, um, he's just been so supportive.

Coach Puryear:

I really felt like not sounding you know cocky, but like we really thought it would have happened a lot sooner. It took 16 years. We've been there seven. We'd been there seven times before winning it. He'd always been very supportive and just always in our corner he was the next person and then it was a team.

Karl:

Right.

Coach Puryear:

I talked to the two seniors because those guys, we don't accomplish what we did this year if it was not for them. Just the guidance and support they had given was just. It was amazing.

Karl:

So let's talk about them a little bit. Samantha Johns and Stella Roboto were the two seniors on your team. I noticed that you did. The video did catch you talking with them right after you know, during the course of the celebration. So tell us a little bit about them. What did they bring to the team that really helped them get over the hump?

Coach Puryear:

Yeah, you know, with Sam Johns, she had had surgery. She had surgery about 12 months, 18 months or so, before the tournament took place, and she basically was still playing maybe 80% 85%. Her knees still would bother her, she would have to go in and she would do treatment on it, and our sports medicine staff did an unbelievable job. Jim Barry did an unbelievable job with her. Some weeks after a weekend of matches, she might have to take off Monday and Tuesday even in order to sort of quell the swelling or just to quell the pain just a little bit. When you watch her play, though, you would never know it, and she was a very, very, very visible example too. Last year we had six freshmen, a very, very young team, and she was a very visible example of what it meant to be a member of Navy Women's Tennis Right. Everything that she did, it didn't matter whether she was losing, it didn't matter whether she was winning, and she played so many matches where she came back after, after losing the first set, three sets, and just grinded out matches. Um, so she was. So that was the example that she set for them.

Coach Puryear:

Um, stella Roboto as team captain, I would say the senior year did not go the way in which she wanted it to. She dealt with some injuries, sort of started injury bug started a little bit in the fall where she started having some problem with her arm. Initially she was playing. She was slated to play anywhere from two to four singles and initially she was playing number one doubles, and so she made it through the fall. But then in the spring, um, it looked like you know things. Things just sort of quelled but it started back up again and initially again we had her playing both singles and doubles and then, uh, we limited how much she was going to play, so we took her out of the doubles because she was having major pain. So it really didn't make sense to double it up. Where we started doubling.

Coach Puryear:

You know her workload when you know the injury was, was really coming to a head, and then eventually her role decreased a little bit in singles as well, where you know she couldn't um, she was having trouble even, you know, holding the racket and it would have been really easy for her to um, to really think what was me and just think about how it was wrong, how, how, how bad she felt about her own situation. But she did the exact opposite. Um, if she I know she did, we we've had talks about it, um, and I know she was very, very upset, but she never showed it and she always found a way to help the team. At times it was as an assistant coach, you know. At other times it was as an assistant coach, at other times it was as a mentor, at other times it was just somebody who was a sounding board for the coaching staff or letting us know what was going on with the team and the pulse of the team, inspiring words of encouragement to her teammates. But she, she did anything and everything she could to be the very best teammate that she could be, you know, for for navy women's tennis.

Coach Puryear:

And I think both those guys and that was a, that was what they brought to the team and it really showed them that we wear on the back of our shirts, um, a phrase, not for self, yep, they embody that um, and in some, and then in turn, it helped our, our very young team, you know, begin to understand what it actually meant to be a member of this team.

Coach Puryear:

And so, if you look at some of the video footage, there are times when the army match, for instance, or bu match to see their their very, very obvious joy, um, for their teammate. I mean that that's natural. There's no, oh well, you know it should have been me out there and feeling disgruntled because they didn't get a chance to play. They were playing, were in every single point, every single match, whether they were on the court, whether they were off the court. You know, it was just a total team effort and I think a lot of that came from our seniors and the seniors learned it from the captain before that, casey Acola, and then also we had three, meghna Kamaraju and Katrina Corpus and Casey Moore, who showed those guys so sort of paying it forward and that was their job. That's what they did this year. It was so very well Right.

Karl:

Well, I'll tell you what. You mentioned the video a couple of times and I will tell you that since that day in April and I think the video came out a couple of days later I've watched that video at least 10 times, and I kid you not, and I was actually. I put a link to it in my last podcast episode and I'm going to do it again. But I challenge any of my listeners to watch that video and if you don't get an eyeball that leaks, you have no heart. It was something you mentioned. The joy that the players had when that point went long and just to watch them celebrate that was overpowering for me and I was just so happy for them. Yeah, yeah, agreed, okay, so last year is done. You're welcoming a new team this year. What? What can we? What can we look forward to in terms of new players, things like that.

Coach Puryear:

So this year, another really, really big plebe class. So we've got six, six, six plebes that we're bringing in or six freshmen, you know we're bringing in, or six freshmen that we're bringing in. We lost Samantha Johns and Stella Ribaudo. Initiating the message will be the same Our job is to really get the most out of what we have to offer each and every day. We cannot live on the laurels of that conference championship which we won. Now we've got the bullseye that's right there on our chest and everybody's coming for us, but we can't look to protect that. We've got to go out because it's a whole new year and last year's year is last year and this year we can use some of the things that we experienced last year, that we learned last year. You know for our success this year, but we've got to earn it all over again. You know for our success this year, but we got to earn it all over again. You know and that's the job, you know the freshmen and sophomores they have to. They have to take those experiences that they learn and they have to use those as best advantage, because this year we want to have some openings.

Coach Puryear:

Losing Sam, losing Stella, we also lost Sia Chaudry, so we have some people that we have to replace, and so people are going we have to replace, and so people are going to have to play different roles and they're going to be asked to play different roles. I think we've got a really good senior class now who were second class last year. You know it's Emily Tannenbaum and then Kate Lee and then Sylvia Ecklund and then Parvathi Shanker. I mean, I think those guys are going to do a remarkable job of helping to lead this team. But we just have to take it just like we did last year one ball at a time, one practice at a time and keep looking to get better with each and every thing that we do.

Karl:

Right, right. Well, certainly, with the players you just mentioned, that definitely serves as a really solid foundation. So I'll tell you what, coach. Listen. That looks like a pretty good place to stop. I really appreciate you stopping by for a conversation with me. I could probably go on another half an hour because I'm such a tennis junkie, but you got things to do. So thanks again, congratulations on a terrific year and I'm going to wish your team the best of success in the upcoming spring, thank you. Thank you, carl. Thanks for having me. It was my pleasure, coach, take care.

Karl:

All right, we are coming down the home stretch. Our question of the day is next. So please stay with us. We are back to wrap things up with our question of the day. So let's go ahead and check out the responses from our last episode.

Karl:

Our question featured Navy Senior Setter Avery Miller from the volleyball team. At the time of the Army-Navy volleyball star match, Averi Miller had a total of 2,700 career assists. She ended up finishing with 2,748. Where does that rank her all time among Navy volleyball players? Is it A first, b second, c, third or D fourth? So I took a look at the responses and 50% of you figured that number was enough to put her at the top and went with A, and then there were 25% of you who had her in second place and chose B, and finally another 25% picked fourth, which was choice D. There wasn't anybody who picked C, which was third place. Now it turns out the correct answer was B. Averi Miller's 2,748 assists is good for second place among Navy volleyball players. She started the year in fourth place on the career list with just over 1,800 and moved past both Ashley Musser and Marissa Watson by the time the season was over. And, in case you're wondering, number one in career assists is Patricia Mattingly from the class of 2019. She has 3,849, so it may be a while before someone comes along to challenge that number, and I think every Miller spot would be pretty secure too, at least for a while, because right now there aren't any players in the top 10 for assists who are currently on the team. They've all graduated.

Karl:

Okay, now let's get to this week's question. During my conversation with Coach Puryear, he mentioned that one advantage he believed the Mids had going into the Patriot League final against Boston University was being on their own home court. Obviously, they were very comfortable playing on that surface and, of course, there was the fan support as well, so that got me thinking about this question what is the longest home match winning streak for the Navy women's tennis team in dual meets? Is it A 11, b 17, c 20, or D 23? Take some time to think about that one and you can get back to me with your answer. And you can do that in two different ways. First, you can send me a message by clicking on the button at the top of the show notes that says send us a text message. This is a pretty new feature and it's just another way for me to connect with you guys. So anyone who sends me an answer using that text message button gets a shout out on the next show. The other way to respond is through the poll question on the Navy Sports Nation group Facebook page and I'll go ahead and get that up by the end of the day. That's going to do it for this edition of Navy Sports Central. Thank you all so much for joining us Now. If you like what you've heard, please be sure to hit that follow button wherever you get your podcasts, and remember to get the word to all the other Navy fans out there. Once again, I'd like to thank Navy Women's Tennis Coach Keith Puryear for sharing his thoughts with us today, and congratulations again to everyone connected with that program on their historic championship season.

Karl:

Our question of the day continues to be a show favorite. You can get in on that by joining the Navy Sports Nation group Facebook page and giving your answer to this week's question. You can also respond by sending us a text. All you need to do is click on the link in the show notes. And just a quick reminder the views expressed on Navy Sports Central are my own and do not reflect those of the US Naval Academy or Navy Athletics. By the way, the music used in Navy Sports Central comes to you courtesy of Audio Jungle. This is a great site for purchasing the rights to use the music from thousands of artists around the world, and those featured in the podcast will be credited in our show notes. Talk to you soon, everybody. Until next time. This is Karl Darden. Go Navy, beat Army.

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