Men's Tennis Midseason Report

Mar. 20

Our recent California trip had some mixed results but most importantly, we learned and developed as a team.  We ended the trip 3-2 and our play was fairly streaky, particularly in doubles.  On a positive note, the ITA released its newest national rankings and we are up to #13 in the country out of about 220 Division III teams.  James Muliawan sits at #5 in the regional singles rankings and Alex Nemerov is #13.  

We started the trip with a solid 7-2 win over an improved team from Chapman and we followed with a great 6-3 victory over the 14th-ranked team in the country, UT-Tyler.  Our doubles in that match was really phenomenal. Niko Ljuboja and Bobby Mactaggart came up huge at #3 doubles to put us in a great position to win that match.  The next match on our trip was against a very tough team from Redlands.  They are very intense and practice almost 4 hours per day, not to mention their #10 national ranking.  We lost a heartbreaker to them last year, so we were out for revenge this time.  We went down 2-1 in doubles but Bobby and Alex played great matches to eventually even the score.  I came back from a set down to even the score at 4-4 and unfortunately James lost a 3rd set tiebreaker at #2 against a very good DI transfer.  Another 5-4 loss against Redlands was a tough one to take for us.

The next day we played #11 Bowdoin College and we came out really flat in doubles and went down 3-0.  I think we were down on ourselves from the day before.  Bobby and I managed to pull out singles wins in a 7-2 loss.  I think our performance against Bowdoin would have been a lot better if we had won against Redlands.  Just to show how evenly matched all the teams are, UT-Tyler actually beat Redlands later in the week and then Redlands beat Bowdoin.  We finished the trip with a good regional win against Sewanee, 8-1.  We also played very good doubles in that match.  

We had some great bonding experiences off the court but I don’t have enough space to get into all of that!  As a side note, the girls went undefeated on the trip against five ranked opponents and they are getting ready to take on #2 Washington & Lee this weekend.

Practice this week has been tough because of grueling winds and our next few matches are against our biggest rivals.  We have lost to W&L the past two years, but they are very young this year, starting four freshmen.  They are currently ranked 19th in the country.  We then travel to Baltimore to play a very good Johns Hopkins team before two home matches next weekend against #9 Kenyon and #15 Mary Washington.  If we do well in our next few matches we could secure an NCAA bid and potentially make a run at the top 10 in the country.  I’ll try to report back on our results within the next two weeks.

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