Weekend Tournament Leaves Lion Tennis in the Cold

Respect is an important part of sports. Sometimes teams ignore the final score, chalking up "mental victories" that they deem more important than the actual outcome.

If that was the case with the men's tennis team last weekend, then it was a double defeat. At the East Coast Athletic Conference fall championships, an event that Head Coach Bid Goswami described as "the peak event of the fall season," the Lions dropped matches to Ivy foes Harvard and Penn, though they did defeat Army on the first day of play.

Seeded eighth heading into play, the Lions wanted to prove that the mediocre ranking was undeserved.

Junior Oscar Chow explained that "we thought we'd be [seeded] higher. We've won the league twice, so it was a disappointment. We tried to prove them wrong and set out to change it."

On Friday, the Lions were well on their way to proving that a number eight seed was indeed too low. They beat the ninth-seeded Army in convincing fashion, 6-1. That was as good as things would get for the Light Blue.

On Saturday, they met up with the tournament's host, top-ranked Harvard. The squad dropped all six singles matches. Team veterans Chow and senior Pavle Jefferson were able to hang tough with their opponents, William Lee and Cliff Nguyen respectively, but in the end were unable to come away with victories.

The Lions won the doubles point against Harvard by taking two out of the three matches. Chow teamed with first-year Ricky Butenko to defeat Chris Chiou and Brian Wan 8-6. The other victory came from the pairing of Jefferson and junior Mark Grae. They took William Lee and Mark Riddell by the score of 8-2.

In the loser's bracket on Sunday, the Lions faced the fifth-seeded Penn Quakers. Looking for a victory that would salvage the weekend with a fifth place finish, the Lions were narrowly defeated 4-3.

The Lions quickly jumped ahead by winning the doubles point and the first three singles matches. They could not seal the victory, though. Jefferson was overwhelmed by David Lynn 6-1, 6-1; first-year Rajeev Emany fell 6-1, 6-0 to Craig Rubin; sophomore Yoku Kiuchi narrowly dropped his match to Andrew Kolker 6-2, 7-5; and Butenko was knocked off in straight sets by Todd Lecher 6-4, 6-0.

Chow was not happy with the team's performance over the weekend.

"I was very disappointed we lost to Harvard and Penn. We knew it was going to be a challenge. We fought against Harvard, but were outplayed. They were more experienced; we brought a very young team."

But, Chow said, the Penn loss was an especially tough pill for the team to swallow.

"Penn was below our level. Our guys just didn't have it. It was cold and windy but it was disappointing to see that we just didn't want it as bad as Penn. The loss to Penn is our coach's second in 20 years," Chow said. "This is just unacceptable for us. We're going to look back on this and use it for motivation."

As the team faces some down time now, before returning to action on Oct. 26, the mood of the team is low.

"We're down right now," said Chow. "But, we have a lot of practice ahead and a lot of the young guys will learn from this; they will learn that they can't just go through the motions."