The No. 3 Duke men's tennis team (5-1) prevailed all week at the National Team Indoor Team Championships in Seattle, Wash., until they reached the semifinals.
The Blue Devils collected wins in dominating fashion against Pepperdine (4-1) and No. 19 Washington (4-0), but suffered their first loss of the season when they faced top-ranked Stanford and fell 4-0. The National Indoors is very important tournament, second only to the NCAA Championships at the end of the season.
"I think we came up in the rankings on everything that's happened so far this year, so you can't be too discouraged by the fact that we moved from No. 5 to No. 3," said Duke coach Jay Lapidus. "So I don't think it was a down tournament, but by the same token I think we have a team that's capable of being No. 1 and winning the whole thing."
The Cardinal received big lifts from senior Alex Kim at No. 1 singles and sophomores Scott Lipsky and David Martin at No. 2 doubles, who dominated throughout the tournament.
Perhaps the biggest upset of the day was the Duke doubles pair of seniors Andres Pedroso and Ted Rueger at No. 2 doubles. The tandem lost to Lipsky-Martin (8-5).
"I thought we had a good chance to win that match," Lapidus said. "A pro-set men's double especially indoors is [difficult] because everybody is serving so big and in some respects, there is a possibility for a lot of upsets or funny results. But, our doubles were not very good last night, I was just disappointed in the way the doubles turned out. I don't think that we were as aggressive in the doubles as we have been."
Against Pepperdine in the opening round, Smith tallied his 100th career victory at No. 2 with a 5-7, 6-3, 6-3 victory over Pepperdine's Stefan Suter. Smith became just the sixth person in Duke men's tennis history to collect 100 career singles wins.
Duke sophomores Alex Bose and Joel Spicher also collected singles victories against Pepperdine with Bose winning over Steve Racioppi (6-2, 6-2) and Spicher over Chase Exon (6-3, 6-3). Like the Stanford match, some of the men did not get to compete because the match had already been decided. A few Blue Devils in the match, Cerenko and Pedroso, got DNF's at Nos. 3 and 4 singles. Cerenko-King also did not finish their doubles match at No. 6.
The Blue Devils return to competition with the next two matches at home against Tennessee and Florida before heading to Texas over spring break to play Texas, Texas A & M, Baylor and Texas Christian.
"Basically in the best six matches we are literally playing five top-ten teams, so it's definitely going to be challenging," Lapidus said. "I think they might make the schedule purposely difficult, when we get up against those teams I feel like we're used to that level of competition."
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