The men’s tennis team wrapped up a strong fall season with another successful performance this past weekend at the Quinnipiac Invitational. Dhruv Yadav ’18 and Greg Lyon ’17 respectively captured titles in the B and D singles flights, while the doubles teams of Steven Chen ’18 / Michael Liu ’17 and Cameron Hicks ’17 / Cameron Daniels ’18 each made the final round of the B doubles tournament.
“I thought it was a good tournament for us,” said Head Coach Mike Fried. “It was a good opportunity for everybody to play a lot of very high quality matches. I thought today was a pretty good representation of the depth of our team.”
Yadav and Lyon both went 4-0 on their paths to the championship, neither player dropping a set all weekend.
“Definitely Dhruv’s play was the standout,” Fried said. “Particularly today were two very good wins in an impressive fashion. He really played some of the best tennis I’ve seen from him since he’s come here, and he showed just how good he can be.”
Fried spoke to the strength of Dhruv’s game overall.
“Dhruv plays a very solid all-court game,” he said. “What he did today, and what he’s been doing very well, is playing very aggressive tennis with enough margin for error that he can do it without making a lot of unforced errors, which makes him a very dangerous kind of player.”
The doubles teams of Chen / Liu and Hicks / Daniels both went 3-0 and were slated to square off against each other in the finals, but a washout on Saturday cut out the final round of the B doubles bracket.
“Cam [Daniels] and I are playing well together right now,” Hicks said. “We get along really well, the chemistry is there, and we’re starting to play really comfortably. I would definitely say that we’re playing like a top-three doubles team right now.”
Figuring out a doubles lineup has been a key point for the Cards all year, as it will be a make-or-break spot for them in the spring’s NESCAC play. This past weekend’s invitational served as a good test, as Wesleyan was the only Division III school in the eight-team tournament.
“Making a lineup is actually kind of a difficult thing to do at this point in the year,” Fried said. “Without really having seen a ton of tennis in outside competition from our guys, we really just put a rough group together and I think it worked out well.”
The duo of Sam Rudovsky ’16 and Jake Roberts ’17 also performed well this weekend, going 2-0 in the A doubles flight before the bracket’s semi-finals and finals were rained out. Chen and Liu each played in the A singles flight, while Win Smith ’18 and Stephen Monk ’15 came through with 2-1 records in the C and D flights, respectively.
Coach Fried said that Chen, who finished as the singles runner-up in last week’s New England ITA Regional Tournament, was just a couple of points away from reaching his second consecutive tournament finals. Although Chen lost in the ITA Regionals, the original winner will be unable to attend the National ITA Championships later this week in South Carolina, so Chen will travel to the tournament instead.
“I think we’ve made a really good progression from the beginning of the season to now, just in terms of setting the tone for how hard we’re going to work,” Fried said. “We’ve shown how tight a group we’re going to be, and how supportive we’re going to be of each other, and the kind of improvement we’ve made just comes with the territory of progressing over the last couple of months with those things in place.”
The Cardinals came into the year with one of the strongest recruiting classes in recent memory, and look to continue the momentum of an impressive fall season into next spring. With play winding down, Hicks and Lyon both said that cardio conditioning and injury prevention would be stressed the next couple of weeks to prepare for the midyear off-season.
“All the freshmen are really good, and they’re really starting to learn how to play doubles like college players,” Hicks said. “If everyone in each lineup spot can just get a little bit better for the spring, it can give us the extra leg up we need for the spring.”