Men’s tennis improves record with dual weekend victories
A 5-2 win over Sonoma State on Friday and a 4-3 win over host University of Nevada the next day allowed USU men’s tennis to nudge its record to 6-5 overall on the season.
“I was very proud of the team,” Head Coach Christian Wright said. “Sonoma State is a good Division-II school. They fought very hard and I thought we did well controlling the tempo.”
Wright declined to pick out any individual performer for praise, saying, “Even in the matches we lost, I felt like we got great effort from everybody. Everybody battled. The effort was incredible.”
Although USU’s first doubles team lost to Sonoma, the next two teams of Hannes Schenk and Dantley Young, and Mike Banks and Nate Ballam defeated their counterparts 8-6 and 8-4 respectively. Then in the singles matches, Oscar Ericsson, Jonas Tyden, Young and Banks all triumphed to finish Sonoma off.
Wright said Sonoma, despite their DII status, is no joke.
“I talked to their coach, and he said it’s hard for them to get matches because a lot of the programs around the country are getting dropped. He tries to schedule every one he can, and he said they have a hard time getting DI schools to play them,” he said.
Saturday brought a more difficult challenge for USU’s netters in the Wolf Pack.
“They have had some really big wins,” Wright said of the Pack. “They beat Oregon and everybody in the PAC 10 in tennis, [which] is tough. Them being a conference opponent, we definitely wanted to do well. We’ve played three conference opponents and we’ve won all three, but they were all battles.”
Tyden and Ericsson, USU’s No. 1 doubles team, erased the memory of Friday’s 8-6 loss by dropping Nevada’s best doubles team 8-5. Although Young and Schenk lost the next doubles match, Banks and freshman Ballam completed an undefeated weekend with an 8-4 win to hand USU the doubles category.
Wright noted that many factors were working against USU as they played Nevada.
“The match yesterday at Nevada, playing at their place, adjusting to the speed of the court and the difference in elevation” were just some of the difficulties, Wright said. “I was really proud of our guys – the way they played smart and fought.”
In singles play, Schenk lost the opening match 6-3, 6-3 to Laurent Garcin, and after Ericsson won his match, Tyden was felled 6-1, 6-3 to drop USU to 1-2 in singles play. Superior depth, however, carried the day for the Ags as they took two out of the remaining three singles matches. Fernando Gallegos won 6-2, 6-4, then Dantley Young dropped a hard-fought exchange with Nevada’s Augustin Myard, 6-3, 4-6, 6-2, setting up a cataclysmic battle between Banks and Guerin Smith of Nevada which would determine the winner.
Smith stretched Banks to extra sets in both games, but in the end Banks prevailed, 7-6, 7-6.
Wright said his team’s depth was a decisive factor against Nevada.
“At different times we have tried different people in the lineup,” he said. “We have good depth on the team. We have players who haven’t seen very much playing time that are very capable of coming in and playing. Our seventh man, Lukas Bouton, won both of his exhibition matches over the weekend.”
Wright said he feels his team is better than its 6-5 record.
“We’ve lost some close matches. We lost 4-3 to Eastern Wash and 4-3 to Gonzaga. We really feel like we could be undefeated, not in an arrogant way. We still have high expectations, and we had a couple of matches where the effort was good and things didn’t go our way,” Wright said.
Now the team faces tougher Western Athletic Conference teams like Boise State and Fresno State, which are highly ranked nationally. Wright said he isn’t too worried about win-loss records.
“Our mindset is to give everything we’ve got, play smart, control our emotions, and good things are going to happen,” Wright said. “It’s one of those conferences that everybody has got pretty good depth on their team. We just know we can’t overlook anybody.”
-graham@cc.usu.edu