For all but one Blue Devil, this weekend’s tournament will close out the fall season.
With the exception of Nico Alvarez, the rest of the Duke squad will compete in the Wake Forest Invitational starting Friday in Winston-Salem, N.C. Alvarez will finish his season next weekend at the USTA/ITA National Indoor Intercollegiate Championship in Flushing, N.Y. The rest of the team will look to continue to improve and close out the fall slate on a good note.
“For everyone except for Nico, this will be the last tournament,” Duke head coach Ramsey Smith said. “It’s important. Every match, every opportunity, every tournament we get to play, especially with this young of a group, is just helping us get better.”
The Blue Devils head into this event after a somewhat disappointing USTA/ITA Carolina Regionals, where no one made it into the quarterfinals. Freshman Adrian Chamdani was Duke’s best player in the singles bracket, losing to Wake Forest’s Jonathan Ho in the round of 16. The freshman duo of Vincent Lin and Ryan Dickerson was the Blue Devil’s strongest doubles pair, also losing in the same round.
The good news for Duke is that, since the Regionals, it have had more than two weeks off before this weekend’s upcoming tournament. This has given the team ample time to put in a lot of work in practice.
“Overall, we didn’t have a great regionals, but we’ve had two weeks and a little bit here of just really focused training,” Smith said. “We’ve had a great two weeks of practice and we’ve been working on a couple things, so I think we’ll certainly be prepared to put ourselves in position to have a good tournament to finish up the fall for everyone but Nico.”
The Blue Devils will also be boosted by the debut of freshman Catalin Mateas, who has been sidelined by a back injury thus far. The Braintree, Mass., native was one of Duke’s highest rated recruits—currently rated as the No. 12 player in the Class of 2015—and will work his way back into the squad by playing doubles at the tournament.
“Catalin Mateas has really been improving physically from a back injury,” Smith said. “He’s had a really good last two weeks and he’s going to be a core part of our team, so it’ll be nice to get to see him play for the first time in a Duke uniform.”
Mateas’ return should help improve the Blue Devils' doubles performance. Doubles is always a tricky area for teams during the fall season, as they deal with new players and try to figure out who plays best with whom.
For a Duke squad with only three upperclassmen and five freshmen, figuring out the right balance in doubles has been particularly challenging. So far, the teams of Andrew DeJoy and Lin and Chamdani and Lin have been the only pairs to post a winning record in their matches.
“Doubles was something that stood out as something we needed to work on, which is understandable with so many new guys and different teams and different matchups. So that’s definitely been a point of emphasis,” Smith said.
With time off to work on their doubles play and on other individual elements of play, the Blue Devils will look to end their fall season with a strong showing. Although getting some individual wins would be nice, the real emphasis is just continuing to improve and gain confidence as the team heads into the more important spring season.
“Overall, the fall’s been up and down,” Smith said. “This tournament is just another opportunity to compete, get some wins and really implement the things we’ve been working on.”
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