With nonconference play officially over, the Blue Devils face a tough weekend of top-tier ACC teams.
No. 13 Duke welcomes Virginia Tech and No. 7 Virginia to Durham for a full weekend of conference competition. After battling the Hokies, Duke will hope to defeat the defending NCAA champion Cavaliers for the first time in 12 matchups when the two teams square off Sunday.
Returning from a trip to San Diego, where they swept San Diego State before falling narrowly to then-No. 2 Oklahoma, the Blue Devils (9-4, 1-0 in the ACC) take to their home courts feeling optimistic about the rest of the season.
“We came up short [against Oklahoma], but I think it showed us that we are definitely up there with the top teams in the country,” junior Raphael Hemmeler said. “Oklahoma’s ranked No. 1 now in the country, and I definitely think this trip helped to give us some confidence going into a huge weekend.”
While Sunday’s matchup against Virginia will be the featured bout of the weekend, the Blue Devils must first beat Virginia Tech (8-5, 1-1). Duke and the Hokies both enter Friday’s matchup coming off 4-3 losses to ranked opponents, with Virginia Tech having fallen to then-No. 19 Boise State. This season’s Virginia Tech squad is led by sophomore Amerigo Contini, ranked 24th nationally and riding a five-match win streak in dual competition.
“They may not be ranked as high as a team like Virginia, but they’re very dangerous,” head coach Ramsey Smith said. “They’re definitely better than their ranking, and they’re going to come here trying to beat us badly. We just need to make sure we [have our] full focus on Virginia Tech, and then after that we can start to think about the next match.”
The next match for the Blue Devil squad is one of the biggest so far in the season. Featured as one of the USTA’s College MatchDay matches covered by ESPN3, the contest will deviate from the usual format—singles will be played first, with doubles happening only in the event of a 3-3 tie at the end of singles.
“The USTA is really promoting college tennis hard,” Smith said. “They’ve invested a lot of resources and money into promoting these 10 biggest matches of the spring season, and we’re fortunate to be one of them.”
Duke is 2-1 against teams currently ranked in the nation’s top 10, having notched wins over North Carolina and Illinois earlier in the year. Virginia (10-2, 2-0) lost its only top-10 matchup when it fell to then-No. 3 UCLA at the beginning of March.
“We have beaten some of those top teams, and having swept our previous five matches before the Oklahoma match has given us a lot of confidence,” Smith said.
The Cavaliers have not played since March 7, having spent last week in Washington, D.C. being honored as the 2012-13 NCAA Champions. Although Virginia’s singles lineup has been subject to change regularly during the season, the roster features No. 6 singles player Mitchell Frank at first singles along with five other nationally ranked players.
On the other side of the net, the first four Blue Devils in the lineup hold national rankings, and the two remaining—Hemmeler and sophomore Josh Levine—have each won four matches in a row and only lost five combined matches all season. With singles play coming first in Sunday’s contest, the Duke squad will not have the opportunity to gain an advantage from the early doubles point, something they’ve relied on in all but one of its wins this year.
“We are a really deep team. I feel like we have a lot of good players, and I think we are great competitors,” Hemmeler said. “We have played really well, we have practiced really well, prepared really well [and] played with a little bit of a chip on our shoulder. We are excited for the rest of the season, and I think that makes us dangerous.”
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