FOREST, Va. – For the first time in a decade, the Guilford College women's tennis program was recognized with Old Dominion Athletic Conference (ODAC) Player of the Week honors, doing so in style with a sweep of the conference honors as Carolina Dirk (Port Aransas, Texas) was named the ODAC's Singles Player of the Week and combined with Erika Mendez (Asheville, N.C.) to receive Doubles Team of the Week for the week ending on March 1^st, as announced by the conference offices on Monday afternoon.

Dirk dominated over the Quakers trio of matches. Opening with a midweek match hosting North Carolina Wesleyan University, Dirk forced a retirement in the second game after toppling the Battling Bishops' Andrea Elaez Miranda 6-3 in the opening game, grabbing GC's lone singles as the team fell 6-1 to NCWU. Into the weekend, Dirk kept it rolling by dominating Covenant College's Maisie Tanchanpongs, dropping just one set in a 6-1, 6-0 victory as GC handled the Scots, 6-1 in a neutral site match at Methodist. Returning to Fayetteville on Sunday, she took care of business against the Monarchs' Emma Hulicki in the top flight, 6-3, 6-0 though the Quakers suffered a narrow defeat in the match, 4-3.

In doubles action, Dirk played alongside Mendez in GC's top flight all week and the duo performed well. In the midweek, they toppled Bethan Fothergill and Renata Torres from NCWU, picking up Guilford's lone doubles win of the match, 6-2. When battling the Scots, the tandem was superb again, as they took down CC's Tanchanpongs and Estee Verdery, 6-1. They wrapped up the week at Methodist with another victory, 6-4 over Hulicki and Shea Bieniek.

Overall, Dirk went 3-0 in both singles and doubles action on the week, maintaining her unblemished season thus far, improving to 7-0 on her own and 6-0 with Mendez in the top flight of both styles of play.

The weekly honors stand as a bit of a landmark for the Quakers women's tennis program in their striving to reemerge among the ODAC's top squads, as it has been nearly a full ten years since a member of the program took home ODAC Player of the Week honors, with the last being Fernanda Gonzalez '16 back on the week ending on March 14^th of 2016. Dirk and Mendez join a list of now just eight Quakers to earn ODAC Player of the Week recognition on record. The first year that the ODAC has distributed an award for the conference's top tandem on a weekly basis, the sophomore pair becomes the first duo to get the award for GC.

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