An unenviable task awaits Billy Martin. At some point next week, the men’s tennis coach will look some of his players in the eyes and tell them that other Bruins are playing better than they are. Martin finds little fun in that yearly “necessary evil” of explaining his first lineup of the dual-match season.
“(We’ve) got such great players one through six and even eight deep. To not have somebody playing is always tremendously difficult,” Martin said. “Everyone has their competitiveness and ego and all that … but we’ve just got to stress that every point, whether it be at (singles spot) six or at one, counts the same amount.”
This weekend’s Sherwood Collegiate Cup provides fringe players one more chance at making a case for spots on the singles ladder. Running Friday through Monday, the annual tournament in Thousand Oaks, Calif. serves as the Bruins’ final individual competition before team play opens Wednesday against UC Irvine.
Martin does not recall any Bruins in recent memory using performances at Sherwood as a definitive springboard into the singles lineup, although the placement of the tournament right after the holiday season gives him an idea as to who stayed sharp coming into the new year.
The local tournament nonetheless proved significant for sophomore Karue Sell last year. Court time from a rough first fall season prepared him for what he considered to be the first tournament in which he played well for UCLA.
“When I came to Sherwood I had some matches, I had that mental stability. … I could play bigger points without feeling a lot of pressure. … I was like a good competitor again,” Sell said of the last individual tournament before his dual-match career began.
A high caliber of competition, comprised mainly of players from Stanford, USC and Baylor, figures to make Sherwood a valuable tournament for any one of the eight Bruins competing in both doubles and singles. USC checks in as the No. 4 team in the nation, while Baylor opens at No. 8. No. 2 UCLA comes in as the most highly regarded team: The Bruins own the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th seeds of the 32-man singles bracket.
In addition to fielding a highly competitive draw, Sherwood presents UCLA with familiar foes. Baylor and USC each own an elimination of UCLA from the NCAA tournament over the last three seasons. According to Martin, several different schools once competed at Sherwood, but the competition condensed to just a few schools about half a decade ago when some programs decided to use the tournament to test out most of their players.
Senior Clay Thompson, whose three years as a Bruin have each seen dual matches against Stanford, Baylor and USC, expects Sherwood’s competitive atmosphere to bring out the intensity of players, especially the younger athletes with “a lot to lose” looking to secure singles spots during dual-match play.
“There’s a lot of players that want to make a name for themselves, especially against the rival schools,” said Thompson, the No. 1 player in the nation. “It’s a marker for where the individual rankings are going to be, but it’s also who you build confidence against. … (It) comes down to sharpening your own individual skills, because you’re going to be playing those players again, no doubt.”