[media-credit name=’BRYAN FAUST/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]For the first time ever, the UW women's tennis team has fallen to DePaul.

The Badgers, enjoying a rare home-court advantage in a travel-heavy spring season, went down 5-2 to the Blue Demons Friday in a competition where Wisconsin claimed the day's first and last points but came up empty on all five efforts in between.

"I can't fault anyone for their effort," head coach Patti Henderson said. "I felt like everyone gave forth a great effort."

And Henderson's analysis does enjoy a certain contextual reality, as she spent the match watching the athletes on her depleted squad competing above their levels across the board. The team's top two players — junior Caitlin Burke and sophomore Nicole Beck — were both forced to sit out the singles game with medical afflictions, though Beck did compete for the doubles point and Burke, donning a gray sweatshirt and black warm-up pants, appeared to informally test her coaching skills as she wandered the courts between points.

Matters worsened after the match as Burke — the team's ace and a veritable contender for All-American status — was given an updated diagnosis.

"I have a stress fracture in my rib … I'm not really sure how long I'm going [to be out]," Burke told The Badger Herald in a phone interview Sunday. "It normally takes 6 to 8 weeks … hopefully [it won't be] that long, because that's pretty much our whole season."

Burke became ill in late February, sitting out a match against Brigham Young University and then garnering a hard-fought victory over Notre Dame despite still being sick. Now it appears that the showdown in South Bend, Ind., may have taken a greater toll on the athlete than the coughs she emitted while playing.

"I'm pretty sure it's from when I played at Notre Dame," Burke said. "I was hurting pretty bad in that match."

On a more optimistic note for the Badgers, DePaul dropped the doubles point Friday with losses at the second and third courts, as the Blue Demons' Anja Mihaldinec and Petra Rehusova folded 8-4 to Wisconsin's Erin Jobe and Liz Carpenter despite the victors' fresh pairing.

"To win the doubles point on them … was very good," Henderson said. "We had a team that hadn't even practiced together, much less competed together, in Carpenter and Jobe. And Chelsea [Nusslock] and Beck did a good job."

As the day's singles competition began, junior Kaylan Caiati found herself in a position she had never experienced before: standing on the top court, racquet in hand, no one above her. With both Beck and Burke sidelined, the Badgers' traditional third court mainstay was promoted to center stage to face a very tough Beatrix Csordas.

Caiati ultimately dropped the match 6-2, 6-3, but with the sort of lengthy points that have become the Badger junior's trademark, the debut effort was impressive by most accounts.

"Well, I'm a little disappointed. I think my fitness level was lower than what I wanted it to be," Caiati said. "Probably part of that was that I haven't done much at all — no cardio workout or anything this past week. So it was a little frustrating."

The lack of a workout didn't come on accounts of any laziness, however — Caiati spent both of last weekend's matches on the sideline as just one of the many Badgers battling health issues.

"I try not to think about not playing for however long it was — I think it was a week and a half. I think coming into the match, I had everything to gain," Caiati said. "I had never played [No. 1] singles before. I'd played two, but never one. So basically, I just tried to go in there to work — to work on my game and get back to where I was before I was sick. I just really try to not think about my illness."

And Henderson agrees with the assessment, shining positive language upon Caiati despite the statistically-ugly loss.

"I think [Caiati] did a great job. I mean, she hadn't played in two weeks," Henderson said. "I felt like, from all accounts, she did a great job there."

The day's lone singles victory belonged to sophomore transfer student Morgan Tuttle, who handed Brenda Leung a 6-2, 6-3 loss that, despite the low game count, proved to be the day's longest match.

"Morgan did a great job," Henderson said.

With the Blue Demons being the week's only competition, the Badgers enjoyed a rare weekend off. And such was almost surely to the benefit of a team that literally has half its roster either sick or on the recovery from various illnesses.