A weekend trip back to the site of its unsettling past gave the men's tennis team a chance to flex the muscle of its present and peer into the promise of its future.
Nearly five months since a confident Duke team was ousted in the quarterfinals of last season's NCAA Championships in Athens, Ga., a new-look version of the Blue Devils made their first trip back to Georgia's Dan Magill Tennis Complex for last weekend's Southern Collegiate Championships. Gone were Duke's former No. 1 player Doug Root and one-time ACC tournament MVP Pedro Escudero, both graduates of the program. And sidelined with a back injury was rising star Ramsey Smith, a senior who was the team's No. 2 player last season and half of one of the best doubles teams in the nation.
Even without three of its four principal players from last year's fifth-ranked team, Duke demonstrated its steadiness near the top behind the consistent play of senior Andres Pedroso, who advanced to the semifinals of the 64-player tournament before bowing out to Middle Tennessee State's Daniel Klemetz. In addition, the Blue Devils flashed the southern competition a glimpse of its near future by entering redshirt freshman Alex Bose, sophomore Yorke Allen and freshman Ryan Heinberg into the mix. Bose, an international recruit from Germany who sat out last season to retain his eligibility, is expected to fill one of the team's top singles slots this spring, while Heinberg and Allen should factor in critically a year from now when four more of Duke's starters graduate.
"I felt pretty good about the weekend," coach Jay Lapidus said. "The future looks bright, but of course Andres is the present. He did a good job and he keeps improving."
Seeded second this weekend, Pedroso received a bye in the first round before cruising through his next three matches without dropping a set.
Into the semifinals, the draw appeared wide open for Pedroso, who was set to challenge Klemetz, an unseeded player, for the right to play for the individual championship.
"I felt pretty confident at that point, but I could tell [Klemetz] was on a roll," said Pedroso, who noted that a change in rackets gave him additional power and a better feel. "I didn't take him for granted, though. You never take anybody for granted because you see it too many times in college tennis where an unseeded player beats a seeded player."
And the Blue Devils saw it one more time this weekend.
In a back-and-forth struggle, Pedroso, the 16th-ranked player in the nation, dropped second and third-set tiebreakers to Klemetz, who then claimed the individual championship for the second time in his school's history with a straight-set victory in the tournament finals.
"I was a little surprised at how good [Klemetz] was because I hadn't really heard of him," Lapidus said. "But it wasn't like Andres played a bad match, he played really well. The quality of tennis was real high and the other guy was surprisingly strong."
Bose, on the other hand, ran into a difficult draw early in the tournament and was dispatched by No. 1 seed Mark Parsons from Tennessee in the second round. Parsons, an integral part of the team that went to the final four of last year's NCAA tournament, handled Bose easily, relinquishing only three games in the two sets.
Although the results weren't pretty for Bose in his first major appearance, much of his struggles were the result of rust more than anything else.
"I don't feel like Alex was match-tough yet, not as sharp as he will be later in the fall and in the spring," Lapidus said of Bose, who was also eliminated along with Pedroso in the first round of doubles play.
As for the other new faces, Allen won his first-round match, while Heinberg advanced to the third round with a stirring victory over North Carolina's Nicholas Monroe. Lapidus said he expects Heinberg to be one of the program's true success stories in the near future.
Despite the focus on individual play this weekend, the Blue Devils were afforded the opportunity to see some of the better players from last year's top-25 teams like Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana State, North Carolina and South Alabama. With the spring season still a few months away, Duke left Athens confident that this year will bring the program's first national championship.
"We definitely fit in well against any of those teams," Lapidus said. "I'm confident in how we match up against all of them. If everything works out, this is certainly going to be the best team we've ever had."
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