The best one-two punch in the country has arrived in
Westwood.
With Luben Pampoulov finally able to play, he and Tobias Clemens
can make the UCLA men’s tennis team unbeatable down the
stretch.
Clemens has already established himself as one of the elite
collegiate tennis players in the country. He is ranked fifth
nationally and has compiled a 117-31 record in his career at UCLA
““ most of those matches at the No. 1 spot.
And get this ““ many say Pampoulov can be better than
Clemens.
He looked the part Saturday against Stanford, in only his second
match and first weekend playing for the Bruins.
Pampoulov was not playing his best tennis, but still dominated
in a straight-set victory over Stanford’s K.C. Corkery.
“I have to get back the feeling of playing the
game,” Pampoulov said. “It might take me some matches
to do that.”
Pampoulov had been practicing with the team, but he had never
experienced the pressure of an intense collegiate match.
“I’ve played a lot of matches before but
haven’t played in a while and have just been
practicing,” he said. “It’s always different
playing a match than practice.”
Just imagine how good he’ll be when he gets used to
college tennis.
“Luben was quite honestly a little nervous out there, and
he admitted it,” UCLA Coach Billy Martin said. “But I
expected him to be.”
With Pampoulov and Clemens in the lineup, that’s as close
to two guaranteed wins as you’re going to get in tennis.
And the rest of the team gets a boost too. The other four
starters get to move down a spot, and play a lesser opponent.
There is no longer a gaping hole at the No. 2 spot in the
lineup, and Alberto Francis, No. 60 in the country, gets to play
the No. 5 spot.
Not many teams have that luxury that deep in the lineup.
“(Luben) is good for the whole team,” teammate
Philipp Gruendler said. “We’re complete now. We all get
to move down a spot and that helps. It’s good.”
It’s really good when you have a player of
Gruendler’s caliber as your “weakest” starter at
No. 6 singles. Gruendler squeaked into the ITA’s top-100
rankings at No. 98.
And considering how many good tennis teams there are, having
ranked players at the No. 5 and No. 6 spots in the lineup is a
must.
And as Martin once told me, you win championships at the back
courts.
Tons of teams have solid players at the top of the lineup. Few
do at the bottom.
Pampoulov could be the jolt this team needed.
UCLA men’s tennis is annually in the top five, but it
wasn’t supposed to be when the year started. This gutty team
has clawed its way to No. 5 in the rankings.
Is the unthinkable possible? Could Luben help this team reverse
its curse and finally win a championship?
(For those of you who don’t know, UCLA hasn’t won an
NCAA Championship since 1984, despite being a top-five team almost
every year).
Why not? Wouldn’t it be fitting for this team to finally
win the championship in the one year it was least expected to do
it?
They’ve already done well at the National Indoors, which
uses the same format as the NCAA Championships ““Â and
that was without Luben.
Without their new phenom, the Bruins went all the way to the
finals of the 16-team field ““ a field with the top-16 teams
in the country ““ but lost to defending NCAA champion Illinois
in the final.
“I know that on any given day, we can beat anyone,”
Gruendler said.
And I think they will.
All of the pieces are falling in place for this team at the
right time of the year.
E-mail Quiñonez at gquinonez@media.ucla.edu.