The UCLA men’s tennis team won the national championship
last season.
So now, as national champions, they can expect more and more
fans to come out and watch them compete, right?
“No, not necessarily,” coach Billy Martin said.
“I think I’m pretty realistic with that.”
It’s a sentiment echoed over and over again, always with a
bit of disappointment and a bit of resignation.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect a lot more people
coming out,” junior Benjamin Kohlloeffel said.
But such is the nature of the beast. At a school like UCLA, in a
city like Los Angeles, tennis is pushed pretty far back in the
collective consciousness of sports fans.
And though Martin expects at least 1,500 fans today when the No.
8 Bruins (9-3) host No. 23 USC (6-4), other matches ““ such as
Saturday’s 6-1 victory over Arizona State ““ draw only a
couple hundred.
Those matches can sometimes be the most difficult to play,
though, because they require the most self-motivation.
“If you lose, nobody is watching,” redshirt junior
Chris Surapol said. “If you win, still nobody is watching.
It’s a bad habit to get into, but still it’s going to
happen. It feels pointless.”
The opposite, then, is also true.
“When you see a lot of people in the stands, it feels like
the match means something,” Surapol said. “If there are
a lot of people watching, there’s no way you can come out
flat.”
That’s why the team’s members assume a sort of dual
responsibility ““ player and promoter. It seems that if they
want fans to show up, they have to do their part to get the word
out.
Junior Philipp Gruendler created an event on Facebook to
advertise the biggest match of the young season. Surapol tells his
friends to tell their friends.
Martin will target this match against USC, along with the
Bruins’ home matches against Baylor and Stanford this season,
as the matches he really wants for fans to attend.
It’s all about creating an environment, an atmosphere in
which it is enjoyable to compete. Matches like today’s
crosstown clash are always emotional and hard-fought, and a
passionate crowd makes it that much better.
“It’s a good atmosphere,” Kohlloeffel said of
UCLA-USC matches. “It’s a little more intense, and
that’s what you need. That’s what you gain your
strength from, when you have those kinds of matches and you have to
compete in that kind of situation. That’s what the NCAAs are
like.”
When Kohlloeffel speaks about what the NCAAs are like, he knows.
He won all of his singles matches in last year’s NCAA
Tournament en route to the team title, UCLA’s first since
1984.
The Trojans, meanwhile, were bounced in the second round of last
year’s tournament.
But it’s a new year, and every time these teams meet,
anything can happen.
Just last season the Trojans scored a 5-2 upset victory in the
first meeting between the teams, a loss that had the Bruins
stinging for months.
“Everybody will be juiced up,” Martin said.
“I’m never too worried ever for a USC match. If you
can’t get up for a USC match, if the crowd when you step out
there doesn’t get you feeling ready to play ““ boy,
maybe sports aren’t for you.”
Though USC has lost four times this season, three of those have
come to teams ranked in the top 20. The Trojans have also been
without junior Jamil Al-Agba, the team’s No. 1 player, who
has yet to play a singles match this season because he is still
recovering from a stress fracture he suffered in the fall.
The Bruins, meanwhile, have won three straight after a tough 4-3
defeat to No. 1 Georgia at the USTA/ITA National Team Indoors. All
of the Bruins’ losses this season have been by a 4-3 margin,
to teams ranked in the top 10.
“We can battle with anyone,” Gruendler said.
“We can be right there again.”
And they expect fans to be right there for them when they take
the courts today.
“It’ll be a good match for sure, and it’s
going to be loud,” Surapol said. “It’s going to
be intense. Every time we play them, you win a point, we’re
yelling at them, they’re yelling at us. It usually reflects
back to the crowd because they have an obnoxious crowd, and we can
too. We showed it last year (in a 5-2 victory at home) and it
definitely helped.”
But the true test will be whether fans continue to show up after
Tuesday, whether they continue to vocally support the last team to
win an NCAA title for UCLA.
There are certainly problems that must be overcome.
Because the team plays in the massive Los Angeles Tennis Center,
fans aren’t concentrated, so it never gets really loud.
Kohlloeffel feels the etiquette involved with tennis may keep
people away.
Furthermore, students walking up Bruin Walk will generally peek
in free of charge, but they won’t stay.
The realist in Martin says it’s probably never going to
change.
“Unless the department really wants to absolutely market
us, and that’s not going to happen for a while,” he
said.
“You need help to market it and get it out there, and I
don’t think by any means we’re the priority. We might
be really at the bottom of the totem pole.”
Unfortunately, Facebook may be the best option.
“For USC it’s always special, and you can use the
famous Facebook now,” Gruendler said. “Just create an
event and see who’s coming. We’ll see how it
goes.”