It was a weekend of ups and downs at home for the men's tennis team, which lost its Saturday match to seventh-ranked Texas (17-2) but battled to a 4-2 victory Sunday against No. 19 Texas A&M.
Coach Jay Lapidus characterized Saturday's 4-3 loss as a disappointment for the team, noting the match's striking similarity to the one the Blue Devils (11-5) played last year: The matches both years came down to a third set between Texas' Paul Martin and sophomore Doug Root. Last year, Duke emerged tired but victorious, but this year Martin came out on top, clinching the victory for Texas.
The Blue Devils struggled both days with their doubles matches, which have proven to be a consistent problem throughout the season. Lapidus made some change's going into Sunday's match-like restoring the No. 8 doubles team of Root and junior Jordan Wile, which had been split up for the last eight matches. But the changes proved to be fruitless when the first and second doubles teams fell to the Aggies, 8-6 and 8-4, respectively.
"We've been struggling with our doubles matches for some time now," Lapidus said. "We put Root and Wile back together and they looked better, but we're still not winning the doubles point. We'll go back and evaluate."
Root agreed that he and Wile, who together earned a 35-8 record in doubles last year, play very well together, but attributed some of their difficulty yesterday to their decision to play alternate sides from their norm.
"We're usually a great team," said Root, who, at No. 1 singles, was the first player to finish and emerged victorious, 6-4, 6-3. "But today we decided to switch sides and that didn't work so well. We're just going to have to work with it."
There was fierce competition across the board Sunday in all six singles matches, with Duke losing only two, giving it enough points to leave the courts as the victor.
With the exception of Root at No. 1 singles and freshman Ramsey Smith at No. 5, both of whom won their matches, all of the singles players went to three sets.
Wile battled Brent Horan at No. 4 in a match that became very heated in the middle of the second set when Wile requested that the referee supervise line calls, maintaining that Horan was making inaccurate calls.
"It helped my game mentally," Wile said afterward. "[Horan] needed to see that I was not going to sit back and take it."
Wile earned the second singles point in the match, making the match score 2-2.
But when Smith, who turned in Duke's top record of the men's fall season with an 11-3 mark, and senior Alberto Brause at No. 2 singles emerged from their matches victorious, the Blue Devils knew they had the win in the bag. Brause bounced back from a close loss in the first set to win in three, 6-7, 6-2, 6-2. Smith won a tough second set to battle for his 6-3, 7-5 win over Dumitru Caradima.
Because the Blue Devils had already earned the victory, both the coaches and referees agreed to end the No. 6 singles match between freshman Marko Cerenko and A&M's Cody Hubbell before they had finished the third set so the Aggies could catch their plane back to Texas.
Lapidus was pleased with the team's performance.
"They played very well," he said. "There were some tough matches, but we played hard all around. We just need to work through some glitches in our doubles' teams."
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