Rebounding positively from a tough weekend, the No. 14 Stanford women’s tennis team (7-1) is looking to regain its momentum against Saint Mary’s (6-2) on Thursday before facing off against Bay Area rivals, No. 5 California (8-2).

One of the things the team needed to know was how well it could bounce back from adversity, and the big loss to UCLA this past weekend has proven to be a perfect test for the players. With one of the largest losses in recent head-to-head history, UCLA beat Stanford 6-1, including an upset in doubles. Fortunately, the Cardinal has only used this loss to motivate its efforts.

“It was a wake up call in some ways,” said senior Lindsay Burdette. “It’s just helping us realize that we definitely need to lay it out there every single day in practice and we might still come up against a team that plays unbelievably that day. Those things are out of our control, but we need to make sure we’re working harder to minimize the things that are in our control.”

Burdette looks to her older sister for an example on how to deal with losses like these. Erin Burdette played for Stanford from 2001 to 2005. In her time here, she amassed a 77-16 dual record – tied for the 15th most wins in Stanford history – and a record of 118-30 overall and was the 2005 NCAA Doubles Champion.

“Whenever I talk to my older sister, she says the team always had one token loss,” Lindsay Burdette said. “It absolutely fueled their fire and engaged them for the rest of the season. She rarely talked about the 7-0 wins over opponents, but I’ll never forget the way she talked about those losses. In this situation, I think about it in the same way. I know we’re as talented as all those teams out there.”

When asked about how the team as a whole was responding, head coach Lele Forood said it was tough to play against a team like UCLA that came out so strong for a weekend at home.

“There is no doubt about it, we’re disappointed with our performance down there,” Forood said. “We know we need to do better. I think it was our first big Pac-10 match of the year, clearly. We ran into a very hot UCLA team at their place and they swept the Bay Area teams over the weekend. They came out and played a little better than we did.”

The next big task is to see how the Cardinal responds to this loss going into its match against Saint Mary’s and, more importantly, in its rivalry game against California. Saint Mary’s is ranked No. 55 in the nation and has only two losses so far, one of them coming against Stanford’s other weekend opponent, California.

Ranked No. 5 in the nation, California has had a very successful season, suffering only two losses to No. 1 Northwestern and recently No. 4 UCLA. With the No. 2 player in the nation in Jana Juricova in addition to two other ranked players, the Golden Bears’ singles lineup is pretty powerful. However, it is their No. 13 doubles unit of Juricova and Mari Andersson that has personal history with Stanford. The two defeated Stanford’s No. 1 pair of Barte and Burdette in last year’s NCAA Doubles Final, and the two will be looking for revenge this weekend.

“It’s going to be tough, a dogfight,” said junior Hilary Barte. “By no means are they going to hand [the match] to us, and personally I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

If this year’s match is anything like last year’s battles, the Cardinal is in for a fight. With both matches being decided by the score of 4-3 in 2009, the contests were nothing if not competitive.

“We had a rousing match at Berkeley last year,” Forood said, “and this year it’ll be a tough test for us. We have to see if we can get ourselves together and produce better tennis. We feel coming out of UCLA that they were definitely good, but we didn’t really show up with what we can be. We need to get closer to our best performances.”

How much does beating Cal matter to the players on the team?

“On one side, it’s just another match,” Barte said, “just another team that we need to take seriously, but obviously we always have that rivalry in the back of our minds.”

Stanford hosts Saint Mary’s today at 1:30 p.m. before traveling to Cal to take on the Golden Bears on Saturday at 12 p.m.