It wasn’t the best of weekends for the UCLA men’s
tennis team.
While the Bruins left Ojai with a Pac-10 Championship in
doubles, that’s not all they left with.
They also left with one sick player and some definite feelings
of guilt.
“It wasn’t such a great weekend, to be
honest,” coach Billy Martin said.
Mathieu Dehaine and Jeremy Drean won the Pac-10 doubles
championship, but only after their opponents were forced to
withdraw from both the semifinals and the finals.
The French sophomores were set to face Bruin teammates Ben
Kohlloeffel and Philipp Gruendler, the nation’s second-ranked
pair, in the championship, but Kohlloeffel fell ill Saturday night
and was vomiting all day Sunday.
“I think the tournament was mad that we didn’t
play,” Martin said of the decision to withdraw.
While a conference championship technically qualifies a doubles
team to participate in the NCAA Championships later this month,
Martin wasn’t sure if the special circumstances could perhaps
preclude the French pair.
He said he would feel guilty about having his No. 3 doubles team
take a spot from a doubles team that is perhaps more deserving.
In singles, no Bruin made a serious run at the Pac-10 title,
which was won by Stanford’s Matt Bruch. No. 1-ranked
Kohlloeffel and Bruin No. 2 Haythem Abid didn’t play singles,
and Aaron Yovan was the only UCLA player to advance past the first
round of the championship bracket. He was promptly dispatched by
California’s Conor Niland in the second round.
Gruendler lost 5-7, 6-3, 6-4 to Washington’s Pierre
Metenier after holding a 2-0 and a 4-2 lead in the third set.
Chris Surapol lost a heartbreaking match to USC’s Kaes
Van’t Hof in the first round, 7-6 (5), 6-7 (4), 7-6 (5).
Surapol led 5-1 in the third set tiebreaker but lost six straight
points to hand the match to the Trojan.
“You kind of just sat there with your mouth open,”
Martin said.
Drean was perhaps the Bruins’ only bright spot from the
weekend, as he advanced all the way to the finals of the Pac-10
Invitational bracket before falling to Stanford’s Blake
Muller, 6-7 (7), 6-3, 6-3.
After Drean had lost his singles match, the Bruins made the
decision to withdraw from the doubles championship.
With the doubles championship set to start at 2 p.m., Martin
said that if Kohlloeffel had stopped vomiting by 1 p.m., he would
have given his No. 1 player the choice to play. However,
Kohlloeffel’s flu-like symptoms, which began around 5 a.m.,
didn’t subside.
That left Dehaine and Drean with their second consecutive
walkover and an easy walk to the title. UCLA’s last doubles
title came in 2004 when Gruendler teamed with former Bruin Luben
Pampoulov.
Martin will now give his players several days off to recuperate,
and then the Bruins will begin NCAA Tournament preparations.
The tournament draw will be announced Wednesday and UCLA will
likely host a first-round match on May 13. The team championships
will be held May 20-23 at Stanford.