Western Kentucky women’s tennis coach Greg Davis has mastered the art of the rebuild in his long and successful career.

This season’s Lady Topper roster is not that – more like a retool than a build from scratch job.

Only three holdovers remain from last season’s squad, with one of those a coming off a redshirt year, meaning Davis has to replace five longtime players off last season’s roster. Not just any players, either — the departed quintet of Sofia Blanco, Rachel Hermanova, Samantha Martinez, Mariana Zegada and Sunskrithi Damera helped Davis post the winningest four-year stretch in program history the past four seasons with a combined 62 wins over that period.

Blanco finished up her WKU career as the school’s career leader in combined singles and doubles wins with 108, becoming the first player to reach the 100-win plateau in school history. Hermanova ranks atop the WKU record book with 62 career singles wins, with Blanco ranking second, Zegada fifth and Damera tied for eighth. Martinez is the school’s top doubles winner with 56 career victories, with Blanco second, Zegada third and Hermanova eighth.

So maybe rebuild isn’t such an extreme label, but Davis already has good feedback on this year’s squad from its performance in fall tournaments at Austin Peay and Middle Tennessee. Now the Lady Toppers are ready to take the next step with Thursday’s home opener against Bellarmine. The 1 p.m. match will be held at the Michael O. Buchanon Park Indoor Tennis Courts.

“It’s a very different team from what we’ve had in the past, from the standpoint of three of the players I’ve had three semesters with but everybody else – I’ve got five players who’ve spent just one semester with me,” Davis said. “Replacing four or five players who had been with me for eight semesters, so it’s a different team from that standpoint. But as the flow went on, they continually got better. So we saw a lot of growth from when they came in to where we were at by the end of the fall. Strength-wise, conditioning-wise, playing-wise especially – we had some results at Middle Tennessee that were very good.”

Davis, entering his seventh season leading the WKU women’s program, has plenty of experience in restocking a roster after previous head coaching stops at Auburn-Montgomery, Louisville and Lamar. His 337 career wins are tied for 23rd-most nationally among active NCAA Division I women’s tennis coaches with at least five years at the D1 level.

A four-time National Coach of the Year, Davis coached Auburn-Montgomery’s women’s team to back-to-back NAIA national titles (2000-01) and then led the men’s team to an NAIA championship in 2002. His first Louisville women’s team accomplished the biggest turnaround of the 2021-22 season, going from five wins to 22 and landing in the the top 75 for the first time in program history.

Davis counts road wins against a tough Marshall squad in 2022 and another road win against North Texas — then a top-75 program — as the Lady Tops’ biggest wins during his tenure. So far, anyway.

Following WKU’s home opener against Bellarmine, the Lady Tops will play challenging road matches at Vanderbilt on Saturday and then Louisville on Monday.

“Bellarmine’s always been a 4-3 and this is the first time they’ve played here,” Davis said. “But they’re always difficult. The first match, for all these schools, is kind of different from most sports because they’re coming back from basically six weeks off. You’ve got maybe a week or less to work with them, so these early matches are kind of a crapshoot.

I like to be challenged. Of course, a lot of time with the Power 4 conferences you’ve got to play them when they’re available, which is on the front end because of their conference schedules.”

After that rigorous opening stretch, WKU will host six straight home matches as Davis works through just who fits best where on his team.

That process started long before any of the players arrived on campus when Davis was recruiting them to the program.

“I want to see that they’ve had success,” Davis said. “The things that I always look at is where was their high point at? And kind of where was their low point at. If they’re consistent, if they’re athletic, that’s a big part of it. But I need to see somebody who’s had some level of success. And plus we take a lot of pride in the academic side, as well. Are they going to be able to do well academically? Usually if players aren’t good academically, we’re always going to have problems throughout the season. And that kind of pulls away from the team concept.”

Seniors Elizabeth Sobieski and Carolina Chiatti, and junior Emily Schut are the returnees from last season’s 15-10 squad. All three should factor into the Lady Tops’ singles lineup, which will lean heavily on newcomers. Seton Hall sophomore Isabelle Einess, a two-time Minnesota high school state champion, enters the season penciled in at No. 1 singles, with junior Andra Sirbu and freshman Barbara Olvera also expected to play near the top of the lineup.

“Some are very aggressive, some are good defensive players – just depends,” Davis said. “But I feel pretty good about our depth. I feel you always have to have people down at seven and eight who have experience and can step in. They’re not going to be coming in cold, they know what to expect. So that’s a big part, is you’ve got to have good seven and eight players too because it’s a grind playing 22, 23 matches in a very short period of time. We try to make sure that we’re very busy in January and February, and then start pulling back a little bit when you get to March and April because of the conference.

“ … The numbers, the analytics will tell you we’re stronger in doubles right now. But I’ve seen a lot improvement in singles. I kind of look at things in segments. These first three matches, I look at as a segment. What are we going to do? Who’s going to break out? Who’s playing a particular way? Who looks like they need to be in the lineup? So I’m going to get a real good idea on that after these three matches because generally I like to get everybody involved. So everybody’s going to play at least singles or doubles by the time we hit the end of those three matches.”