Kenya brushes off Tram to advance to the second round at Women's World Tour

Kenya's top seed Angela Okutoyi edged out Demi Tran of Netherlands 7-5, 6-1 as the women's ITF World Tennis Tour entered Day 3 at Peponi School, Ruiru.

The Kenya Open champion will now face Sada Nahimana of Burundi in a mouth-watering second-round clash.

Nahimana, who is the highest-ranked African in the event and currently seeded 12th in the ITF Junior ranking beat Konishi Camargo from Brazil 6-3, 7-6 (4) to book a place against the Kenyan who is ranked 355 places below her.

Okutoyi’s ability to overcome the first-round sluggishness and nerves saw her comfortably secure the first-round win in one hour 31 minutes. After starting off well to take a 2-0 lead, Okutoyi let out a couple of errors to hand the advantage to Tram who led  4-3. 

Okutoyi bounced back to tie the match 4-4 and then took a 5-4 lead. Tran didn’t let the set go and she managed to level the score before the 15-year-old Kenyan bagged the set 7-5. The second set was all in Okutoyi’s hands as she didn’t let her opponent off the hook. She took a lead of 3-0 before a number of poor serves earned the Dutch the game. Okutoyi went on to seal the point seal the match 6-1 with three straight wins.

"I was just off, basically," Okutoyi said of the shaky start against the Dutch. "And then instead of correcting it, I just kept getting worse, just to be honest. I knew I could only go up. That's what I told myself. I just got to keep positive. It was just a strange start to that match for me."

"You could see that in the first set. I was literally not hitting any balls in the court and I had to do something in the second set,” she said.

However, it was a different story in the doubles as Kenya lost to strong opposition. Okutoyi and her twin sister Roselida Asumwa came up short against Sofia Dmitrieva and Alija Merdeeva of Russia, losing 6-2, 6-2.

Asumwa struggled with her serves in the match, earning their opponents a number of easy points in the opening set. Dmitrieva and Merdeeva were strong taking up a 5-1 lead in the first set.

It was slightly the same story in the second set with Dmitrieva and Merdeeva taking a 3-1 lead before the Kenyan pair won the fifth game. From there on, Kenya kept on playing catch-up but in vain.

In the other match, Judy Nkatha and Faith Nyabera lost to India's Diana Mihail and Avika Sagwal 3-6, 6-1. Nkatha and Nyabera let off their first set lead of 3-0 to go down 6-3. In the second set, the Kenyan duo could only level the scores to 1-1 before falling 6-1.