WINCHESTER, Va. – Senior Steven Baker is in his second year of blogging about the men's tennis team and opens his first blog of the spring season by giving us an initial recap of the first few weeks of the outdoor campaign.
Over the course of the first seven matches of the season, we have grown immensely as a team. We started off with a huge win over DII Shepherd, who we had last faced in 2014 and never beaten before.
During the following five matches, we hit several ups and downs. Our first outdoor match against Stevenson was a very tough transition for everyone. While we are very fortunate to have the Winchester Country Club courts to train indoors when the weather doesn't permit us to play outdoors, the first few outdoor matches are always a struggle for us.
Our first conference match of the season was against Guilford. We were missing our Nos. 4 and 6 players, which hurt us against the Quakers. We all believe the outcome will be different if we see them again in post season. Although we were missing some team members, everyone fought hard and made it a good match. It was a definitely a step in the right direction.
Washington and Lee is always a tough match for us. They are consistently the best men's team in the ODAC and are always ready for competition. Our closest match was at No. 4 singles, where Brett Dubin was just a few points short of pulling off a big upset. Even though we lost every match, it was an excellent training opportunity that made all of us better for future competition. It's always good to play a team like W&L because it gives you an idea of where we want to be by the end of the season should we meet again in the first round of the eight-team conference tournament.
Our most recent match was a classic match up. Hampden-Sydney is a traditionally strong program that has fallen off a bit at the time that our program has gotten stronger. We were expecting a close match and Sunday delivered.
The past three years we have had the opportunity to play them at UVA's indoor facility (Boar's Head) and we were all pumped to play them again at this great facility.
It has become a tradition with fantastic tennis and the opportunity to watch UVA, who has won the NCAA Division I national championship in two of the last three years, play Florida State prior to our match.
We found ourselves down 2-1 after the doubles portion and knew we had some work to do if we were to pull off the win. We would have to win four of the six singles matches to clinch the victory and we did just that. We fought for victories at the Nos. 1, 3, 4 and 6 singles to give us the 5-4 edge and clinch the victory.
We seem to be back on a winning track and are looking forward to continuing our success in ODAC play. We have two huge matches today versus Emory & Henry and tomorrow versus Randolph-Macon. Come out and support the Hornet tennis programs!!
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