Men's tennis sweeps away season's first competition
Last week, junior Oscar Podlewski said the men's tennis team was "foaming at the mouth" to get the season underway. After a pair of 7-0 sweeps to begin the spring slate, it's easy to see where all that foam came from. The 34th-ranked Owls rabidly tore apart Lamar University and Prairie View A&M University last weekend, in a manner as near to perfection as possible. Disregard the fact that Lamar and Prairie View A&M lack the prestige or the recruits to push them into the top 75, and forget the fact that these two squads were scheduled as little more than tune-ups for the unwieldy ranked foes that will soon beset Rice. These factors, if anything, should have lulled the Owls into a stupor of overconfidence.
But according to assistant coach Efe Ustundag (Baker '99), there was little cockiness to be found among the Owls, especially in No. 19 Bruno Rosa.
"Sometimes teams like Lamar sneak up on you and hurt you confidence-wise more than anything else," Ustundag said. "Sometimes you can get in the situation where your players may fall asleep for a few games here and there and lengthen the match. But Bruno was boom-boom-boom. He was on target the entire match and took care of business and got off the court quickly."
Rosa, a senior, paced the Owls with his brilliant play, losing only one game over the two-match span. After an up-and-down junior year, it is easy to see why the senior is currently ranked 19th in the nation.
The veteran player ran off the court quickly enough to watch the rest of his teammates follow his lead. A trio of matches went to three sets in the bout with Lamar, but sophomores Isamu Tachibana and Andy Wang and freshman Jonathan Chang all came out on top when the final scores were tallied. Against the Panthers, however, Rice put on its most dominant performance in years, winning every set they met on their way to victory.
"[We] played hard, and that was what we were really looking to get out of it: a good, concentrated effort," Ustundag said. "It's good to have a strong start like that. . We did what we had to do. Now we're ready to take on a much tougher task."
That task comes tomorrow in College Station, Texas, when the Owls enter the first round of the National Team Indoors Qualifying Tournament. Their first opponent comes in 24th-ranked Oklahoma State University, which will provide Rice's first real test of the season. In addition to the fact that they're already coming in with a win against a Conference USA opponent - Oklahoma State bested the University of Memphis last week - the Cowboys will bring top-ranked Oleksandr Neyovyesov, winner of the 2009 Player of the Year award. As improbable as it may seem, this will be the second time in four matches that Rosa and the Owls will have faced the No. 1 player in the nation: Rosa dropped a straight-set show with the then-top-ranked Arnau Brugues of the University of Tulsa in last year's C-USA finals.
If the Owls manage to get past the Cowboys, they will play the next day against the winner of Saturday's Texas A&M University/Fresno State University contest.
When asked about who he would rather face Sunday, Ustundag was nothing less than blunt.
"Oklahoma State is not easy enough of an opponent for me to comment on that right now," he said. "We have to take care of Oklahoma State. If we do, it'll set up a nice match."
But the possibility of overconfidence, accrued from last weekend's easy wins, still hangs in the air. After all, the Cardinals and Panthers were more than likely the two weakest teams the Owls will face this season. It would be easy for Rice to puff out its chest after last week's result, losing focus on this weekend's test, the first viable opponent they have faced this year. According to sophomore Christian Saravia, however, last weekend didn't put the Owls on a pedestal so much as it warmed them up for the competition to come.
"I think [playing unranked opponents] is the other way around - I think it prepares you," Saravia said. "It's a good warm-up, and you get a good sense of competition again after break. And now it's just a matter of getting everybody set and going all out.
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