Dana Macalanda was always into martial arts. She grew up watching Jackie Chan movies and was enrolled into taekwondo at age 10. She practiced her craft intermittently until the end of high school. She continued with martial arts all throughout college and joined the wushu club, which didn’t seem like a far-off next step for her. Except it was.
Wushu is entirely performance-based. In other words, no hitting.
It was the second day of the Pac-12 Championships in Ojai, Calif. and the women’s tennis team changed their focus from yesterday’s singles play to today’s doubles.
Representing Oregon in the doubles championship draw, Lana Buttner and Nicole Long faced California’s No. 4-seeded Lynn Chi and Anett Schutting in the round of 16. The Buttner-Long duo, which wasn’t a typical combination during the regular season, lost 8-4.
In the first day of the women’s tennis Pac-12 championships, the Oregon women’s tennis team had six girls competing. All except one fell in the round of 32 for their respective division.
On paper, the Collegiate Wushu Tournament looked like a bust for the three University of Oregon students who traveled to the University of Maryland on Saturday to participate.
They kept getting lost. There were fallen sashes and forgotten moves during forms. None of them placed.
However, for freshman Elirissa Hui and sophomores Wing Ng and Kevin Lai, the trip was anything but a failure. Despite their rankings, they all found reasons to consider it a success.
While the women’s team took on the Cougars in Pullman, Wash., the men’s team had a rematch against Washington in Seattle. The Huskies (11-12, 2-5) claimed a 4-3 win over the Ducks (15-8, 1-6 Pac-12).
Although the Ducks won the doubles point with victories from the 64th-ranked duo of Robin Cambier and Kevin Farin and the pair of Daniel Sardu and Jayson Amos in the No. 1 and No. 3 spots respectively, the Huskies’ dominant performance in singles is what pulled them ahead of Oregon.
After a non-conference match against Idaho, the Oregon women’s tennis team headed to Pullman, Wash., for its final match of the regular season. There the Ducks faced off against the No. 45 Washington State Cougars and lost 4-2.
Oregon women’s tennis (7-12, 1-7 Pac-12) lost their fifth straight conference match to No. 6 California 4-0 in its last home game of the season.
The Oregon women’s tennis team’s slump continued Friday when it faced off against the No. 7 Stanford Cardinal. Proving why five of their six players are ranked, Stanford showed their prowess and dominated Oregon 4-0.
The Ducks took on No. 40 Washington in its third-straight match against a ranked team and came away with its fourth-straight lost.
The doubles point was lost by the Ducks in a tiebreaker match between Washington’s Elianne Douglass-Miron and Riko Shimizu and Oregon’s Sofia Hager and Nicole Long.
The wushu club is living out a lot of sports’ worst nightmares. Its members have a dedicated team ready to train, but no coach.
And that’s just the way they like it.