Finishing Up

It’s been a good while since the last post, so lots has happened. We went 1-3 in our last four matches, losing to Linfield, Pacific, and Willamette. The  bright spot was an 8-1 win against Lewis and Clark. I should add there were a lot of good performances down the stretch, Peter and Josiah played some great doubles matches at #1 in the last matches of the season and really brought their game up a level to do it. Our match against Willamette was the biggest surprise to me, and best effort of the 2nd half of the season.

Pax's first win @ #4!!!!!!

We came in with our passion buckets full, and had the Bearcats on the ropes before they turned things around in a couple tiebreakers. Me and Nolan won in our doubles team debut, so we had one point going into singles. Nolan also won at #6, Preston beat Michael Baumgartner  at #1 and Peter and Josiah were both up in their matches before being beaten in third sets. In that match I played #2 against Josh Wong. I’m not in favor of cliche’s but it was probably the best thing for my tennis getting beat like I did. He is one of the smartest player I’ve played in college. Lots of long rallies where all of his balls bounced back near the baseline and he’d just wait for a short one to tee off a backhand approach. Or if I got a short ball, I’d come in and he’d just send up a lob, I’d run back, and hit another forehand approach, and we’de do the same dance all over again. Literally he would start to grin during the point, and it wasn’t even a “I’m controlling this you stupid untalented jackwagon” type of grin. It was more a grin that just said “oh boy tennis is fun!” Very nice guy, and definitely gave me some things to work on moving ahead.

Staples 1st win @ #5!!

Overall, our season ended in a tie for fifth with Linfield.We fell just short of our goal of making the conference tourney this year, which was disappointing. I think with the guys that are  here though and the work ethic they have, its gonna be good times in the future. I’ll be graduating, but let’s be honest, that won’t be a huge loss the way I played this year.

Some good news – Four of us are eligible to go to the Ojai Tourney, its kinda like Mecca for tennis on the West Coast. The D-III west regional tournament is there for singles and doubles, as well as the Pac-10 and other open, and  community college tourneys all on the same week. So its a lot of good tennis and an honor to participate it.  Justin and Peter will play doubles and Me and Preston will be in the singles side of things. Right now I’m a little hesitant to go because it means I would be missing graduation, I’ll be making a decision regarding that soon, but…if you wanna vote for one or the other go ahead and leave a comment!

Overall though, it was a very good season with a lot of good steps in the right direction. Had a lot of freshman gain confidence as well as receive a lot of good mental coaching many of us had never experienced myself included. Moving ahead our team will have to get better at doubles, that was always the common theme in losing was that we usually got swept in doubles when we lost matches. If we won just one of the three it usually ended in an team win or we were in a position to win late in the overall match. Thanks for reading! – SB

Final Stretch

Back in Oregon now for the last couple weeks of the season. We had some good performances in Cal but fell short in our last couple team matchups down there. We got rolled by Willamette  the last day of our trip 8-1, it also came with another negative of Josiah hurting his knee – causing him to pull out in his second set against Matt Houser after winning the first. That happened on Tuesday – the next Saturday we were off to Spokane to play Whitworth. Josiah didn’t play so our doubles line up was shaken around with Justin joining Peter at #2. We had a few good moments but let the more aggressive Pirates push us around too much and got swept in the doubles.

For singles we had a lot of close matches, including me squandering 3 match points after coming back to force a super tiebreak. – That’s one I’d like to forget and learn from at the same time. Note to self – never lose after having match points when you have a 7 hour van ride home after the match – way too much time to think about it.

The highlight of the day was Andy winning at #6 for us in a 3rd set super-breaker, he’s been playing very well lately and with some injuries we’ll need him to.

In the final week and a half of the season we have four matches – all against the Oregon schools, Linfield on Thursday is a must win if we want keep our goal alive of making it into the top four in conference and going to the year end tourney. It’ll be tough with Josiah’s knee in question but this team is not going to be one that makes excuses so whoever’s in the lineup vs the Wildcats will be expected to fight and deliver just the same. Let’s go George!

p.s – I’ll probably be posting some more photos from California so look for those soon.

Sun Fun

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We landed on Wednesday afternoon and drove right out to Indio to our condos. The only stop was an impromptu practice at some community courts along the way in Palm Desert. Thursday we spent most of our day at the BNP Paribas grounds. We volunteered to run a vendors both and in exchange got credentials to roam around most of the facilities. That was by far the highlight of the trip so far, we got to see Sharapova, Almagro, Federer, Nadal (who signed my shirt), Tsonga, and a bunch of other players in the top 20 just wandering around or warming up on the outer courts. Thursday night we watched the Nadal and Karlovic match which turned out to be a thriller.

Friday we played some practice matches against College of the Desert which is a crazy good community college down here with players from just about everywhere but America – So you know they must be good. After our matches ended we progressively went over to the tournament again and got to see some more players practicing including my favorite – Nenad Zjimonic. For the night session we go to see Federer and Wawrinka take on Marc Lopez and Rafa. It was a very fun match with lots of jaw droppers included. After that some of us watched Sharapova and Wozniaki while others snuck on to the outer stadium courts to hit.

Afterwards we took off for our next location in Newport Beach. If Indio was a mansion this is a palace, I’ll post some pictures later of where we are. Today we take on Biola who beat us last year 8-1, hope to turn that around this time. – SB

Going Away on a Jet Plane!

After beating Lewis & Clark Saturday and losing a non-conference bout with some egotistical cowboys from Hardin-Simmons Monday, we’ll be taking off tomorrow for Spring Break. Destination is Indio, CA where we’ll be staying in nicer condos than a D-III tennis team should be allowed to. We’ll be playing Biola, Willamette, and Hope International, possibly more if the opportunity occurs. Also, two of the nights in Indio (Thursday/Friday), we’ll go to Indian Wells and watch the quarterfinals of the BNP Paribas going on down there. Personally can’t wait for that, hope to see Berdych, Fed, and maybe even the savior of America: Ryan Harrison. I’ll be updating this every couple days with some photos too, so stay tuned!

Order Has Been Restored

6-1 6-3. All is right with the world.

549 to go…

I’ve always liked Marat Safin as one of my favorite players. Big, athletic, and Russian I am not, but I love his forehand and his press conferences and I play with his racket, the Prestige. Anyways, today I took an important step in becoming more like my idol as I broke my first racket ever. It was a culmination of playing badly so far this season and  getting discouraged cause I know how much I practice and I just seem to get worse while everyone else on the team gets better. Case and point, Justin slapped me around this afternoon and after shanking another backhand return I turned around and let the racket go like a helicopter into the fence. The surprising part was it actually broke, I barely ever let it hit the ground and when I chuck it I always pick a soft target (like whoever is playing #6 for the other team). But it must have hit just wrong and I saw this huge crack in the throat as I picked it up. After losing the next point I walked up to the net and broke it all the way. To everyone looking it appeared that I just snapped it with my bare hands. It looked impressive. What was really impressive was the way Justin played in the practice match, He can say goodbye to the #4 spot I’m pretty sure, and good chance I’ll say goodbye to the #1 spot soon enough as well. Either way, I’m committed to never letting my next rackets ever touch the ground. Safin once said that he averages breaking around 550 rackets a year, that can’t be true, but that’s over   $100,000 there. So I think I’ll rest my case at 1, to catch him I’d have to play Justin like twice a day for the rest of the year. Anywho, tomorrow night I am going down to Eugene to see the Nike Clash of the Champions exhibition between Federer, Nadal, Sharapova and another WTA player nobody cares about since Serena dropped out. I’ll probably post a few pics of that in the next week so stay tuned. – SB

Rough One

On Saturday we ran into our first loss in two weeks falling to Pacific 5-4. They’re another team that has a number of freshman in their top lineup. Unfortunately we found ourselves on the other end of a 5-4 match after only winning one doubles point. Me and Preston were able to win out 8-6 and played a solid match at #1. However the winning streaks of our #2 and #3 teams came to an end in fairly decisive victories for Pacific. In singles I lost at #1 in 3 sets, Peter lost in straights at #2 but our 3-5 spots played well as usual getting us to four points for the match. Paxton Magaway made his season debut after being declared eligible the day before and played a good first set before losing 6-1 in the second. There were some positive things that happened in the day, Justin got some good revenge in his match from a loss in the fall to Derek Cooley. Josiah gutted out a three set win in the 3rd set tiebreaker 8-6. And winning at #1 dubs was a good accomplishment after having lost several in a row. However to have come so close and not finish the way we wanted was disappointing and probably what we’ll all remember. Our goals moving forward are to improve in doubles and work on returning better as the big serving gave us fits at times. Next up we have Lewis and Clark on Saturday – should be a good match to try and get back in a groove. On the following Monday we’ll take on Hardin-Simmons from Texas who is out on their Spring trip (who takes spring break to Oregon???) We expect a very tough match with them and are looking forward to upping our effort and intensity next weekend – SB