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The Minot Ryan tennis team will be looking to be a force in the west region this year. The Lady Lions have a new coach in Andrew Evanoff who is continuing to evaluate his team. But with 4 returning players at the varsity level, the Lady Lions feel they can be more competitive this year and be in contention for a state berth. Andrew Evanoff, Minot Ryan tennis coach:It's a wide open lineup as far as right now. We're still determining who's playing where. To be honest I haven't been able to predict a thing. Everyone's so evenly matched. It's really gonna be something to see. A strong senior leadership. We only got three senior girls. All of them had varsity experience last year. Really excellent leaders getting the young girls fired up and everything so. It's a good spread of the age groups, a lot of interesting girls. Shannon Dobrovolny, senior:I think the varsity gonna's be very competitive, especially the lower couple of spots because those young girls are coming up and they don't have varsity experience so they really don't know how they're gonna match up. Meghan Korzun, senior:I feel extremely strong. It's a young team but we're all very talented players here so I'm excited. Meanwhile the Lady Lions point to Minot High and Bismarck Century as two of the early season favorites. Evanoff:Mr. Lyon will always has a good team over at Minot High and Bismarck Century I know has been one of the strong holds in the girls tennis over the past few years. So we'll be looking to them to be the key competition. As far as the other teams, I'm not quite sure what to expect yet but I can't count anyone out. The Lady Lions will open their season on Friday when they meet up with Minot High.