Tennis NCAA Tournament Recap

Wednesday, May 21 2008 by Tim - ,

I fell behind a little bit on my blogging in the last couple weeks, so I'm going to recap the rest of the NCAA Tournament for the Tennis team in one post.

The team continued an [expected] strong weekend by defeating #39 Penn State 4-0 last Sunday.

After a few days off to prepare for Tulsa, the Hoos took down #16 Michigan in equally strong fashion, winning 4-0. Including the ACC Championship game against Miami, that made for four consecutive 4-0 wins, all in tournament play. That's impressive.

After Michigan, the team had yet another rematch against #10 Baylor. This match proved to be tougher than the previous ones (to be expected), but the good guys prevailed 4-2 anyway.

And then came our nemesis. #5 Georgia, who knocked us out of the NCAA tournament last year in the semi-finals on their way to winning the title was up next. This match was surprising in a lot of ways. I haven't done too much looking into it (I didn't get to follow it live) but it appears we had some surprising losses and apparently some cramps that hurt us with at least one position. In the end, this was too much for the Hoos to overcome and Georgia won 4-3.

A couple of awards for the team have come in since then - Coach Boland winning the ITA National Coach of the Year and Somdev winning the ITA National Senior Player of the Year. To quote the guy who got me started on this sports blogging thing: "Seconds it would take them to trade those awards for a national title: One."

It's a shame to see this season end this way, but a 32-1 record on the season is nothing short of incredible. We still have the singles/doubles competitions left so we'll get to see if we can get some individual titles instead.

Coach Boland certainly has us on the right track, I'm really looking forward to continuing to follow this team.