Men’s Warhawk Invite: Doubles and Depth pays off

The Men’s Tennis team hosted the Warhawk Invite this past weekend featuring some solid competition from Ohio Wesleyan University, Wheaton College, and Grinnell College.  We were able to play 13 players throughout the tournament giving many players valuable experience along the way.  Our doubles play and depth were the keys to our wins of 8-1, 8-1, and 9-0 on the weekend.

Our doubles went undefeated on the weekend, improving our spring doubles record against D-3 competition to a combined 26-1.  Our depth continued to prove to be solid as well.  Some of the lineup changes were intentional and anticipated, but some were due to injuries.  Humphreys is still recovering from his injury and was held out of singles and was only able to play in two of the doubles matches.  He was out totally on Saturday’s match against Grinnell.  Navratil also got injured and was held out of singles for the last two matches.   Beck was also held out of a singles match.  Everyone that stepped up, played very well, showing that practices and the hard work everyone has been putting in is paying off.

 

There were so many terrific performance in the three matches it’s hard to talk about them all, but some of the one that stand out in my mind were a couple of the close ones.  Justin Bowman pulled out a 3-7, 7-6 (2), 10-8 win pulling out two gutsy serve and volley points at the end of his match tiebreak to earn the victory against Wheaton.  Also against Wheaton, Matt Zurowski played a very solid match at #3 but lost 7-6(9), 6-4 to Matt Steiner.  Bisbee and Schnarr each got three wins on the weekend and looked very good doing so.  For all the match scores from the three matches go to our website http://www.uwwsports.com/index.aspx?tab=tennis&path=mten for the stories and scores for each match.   Venkatesh Yuvaraj was able to get his first spring dual match experience this weekend as well playing three solid exhibition singles matches and an exhibition doubles match picking up two nice wins.

We are back in action today (Tuesday) for a rare weekday pair of matches at PTF in Janesville against NAIA Cardinal Stritch (1pm) and Edgewood College (5:30).  The task won’t be easy, because in addition to Humphreys still being sidelined, Treis and Shklyar each will be limited or out today due to some new injuries.  The injury bug has officially hit, but we’ll get through it soon.  Good thing we are deep!

This weekend we are hosting or annual  Alumni event for both men and women on Saturday,Feb 28.  It’s a chance for our Alumni to get out on court with the players (tennis at PTF from 1:30-5:30 at PTF). Then we will be doing a dinner at 7pm at 841 Brewhouse (formerly Randys) that many of the Alumni and supporters are planning on attending. 

GO WARHAWKS!!