Trinidad and To­ba­go Un­der-12 girls' ten­nis team missed out on the op­por­tu­ni­ty to progress to the fi­nal round of the In­ter­na­tion­al Ten­nis Fed­er­a­tion (ITF) World Ten­nis/Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean Ten­nis Con­fed­er­a­tion (COTECC) Un­der-12 Sub Re­gion 4 Mas­ters Tour­na­ment on Sat­ur­day af­ter­noon, fol­low­ing a 3-0 de­feat by host na­tion, Cos­ta Ri­ca.

​The re­sult hand­ed the team, com­pris­ing Tei­ja Welling­ton, Anaya Roberts and Zara Walk­er, their sec­ond loss in the four-team group, with on­ly the top two ad­vanc­ing. Yes­ter­day, they were sched­uled to face the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic to de­cide third and fourth place.

​Com­ing off a 3-0 de­feat to Mex­i­co on open­ing day, Fri­day, the lo­cal ten­nis princess­es sought re­demp­tion against the Cos­ta Ri­cans, but to no avail.

​Anaya Roberts, who had fall­en to Mex­i­co’s Sofia Guillen in the sec­ond sin­gles rub­ber, was un­able to turn her luck around, go­ing down 6-1, 6-1 to Va­le­ria Or­tiz on court sev­en.

​Trail­ing 1-0 af­ter the first match, na­tion­al coach Javier Jo­vani Lewis opt­ed to main­tain the pre­vi­ous day's sin­gles line­up, send­ing Welling­ton out against Aman­da Munoz on the same court. How­ev­er, there was no turn of favour for the T&T squad as Welling­ton, who was beat­en 6-3, 5-7, 10-3 by Mex­i­co's Ana Rafaela Re­sendiz on Fri­day, suf­fered a 6-1, 6-1 straight-sets de­feat to Munoz, con­firm­ing T&T's elim­i­na­tion from top-two con­tention.

Lat­er iIn the dou­bles, Welling­ton and Roberts paired up seek­ing a con­so­la­tion win against Ji­me­na Gam­boa and Or­tiz, but the Cos­ta Ri­cans, buoyed by home sup­port, as­sert­ed their dom­i­nance with a 6-3, 6-2 vic­to­ry.

​Lewis not­ed that while his play­ers matched their op­po­nents' tal­ent, the men­tal as­pect of the game proved de­ci­sive.

"They would have played very well, de­spite the ad­van­tages that the oth­er teams por­trayed," Lewis said. "When it comes to play­ing the phys­i­cal ten­nis against these teams, we can play with them, but the men­tal as­pect is what we need. We have to work on the men­tal as­pect of our play­ers. That, I think, is the bridge or the dif­fer­ence be­tween us ad­vanc­ing to the next lev­el of ten­nis. But oth­er than that, we played well. They played well."

He added, "When it comes to the court smarts, the way you call it, you'll call it like that. The court smarts or the IQ of the play­ers. (1:28) We need to get to that par. What needs to be done tac­ti­cal­ly when you're in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions; they have that on par. For ex­am­ple, if they have to play a de­fen­sive shot, if there's a deep ball and they're un­der pres­sure, they know in par­tic­u­lar what shot to hit.”

Lewis, who rep­re­sent­ed T&T at the Davis Cup and in­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments, re­mains con­fi­dent his team can over­come the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic if they main­tain con­sis­ten­cy and ex­e­cute their game plan.