The highest stakes at the Los Angeles Tennis Center last Saturday night may well have been just steaks. With a dinner bill on the line, rackets were kicked and bounced off the courts, with one player even pantomiming the act of smashing his on the side of the net as most of the UCLA men’s tennis team was sorted into one of two competing teams.
Such was the atmosphere during a practice in that occurred exactly a week away from No. 6 seed UCLA’s hosting of the NCAA tournament’s first two rounds.
Senior Clay Thompson sees this year’s squad as being less “entitled” and a little more motivated than the 2012-2013 incarnation, which enjoyed a No. 1 ranking throughout the year.
Junior co-captain Marcos Giron acknowledged that the proximity of the postseason combined with the rarity of full-on matches to produce a thick competitive air.
“When we play each other, it gets competitive. But we’re not going to go kill each other,” Giron said. “We still have our pride and want to win. You can feel in the air that NCAAs are a week away and we’re all excited.”
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Pitted against Giron on court one, Thompson reacted to his failures and misfortunes against Giron in a decidedly more lighthearted fashion than his teammates in a matchup between the Bruins’ alternating top singles players.
Giron at one point cursed aloud his inability to serve for the match point. Thompson sprawled himself on his back after a lost point in one moment, and skipped around laughing in a different instance.
Coach Billy Martin was composed speaking about his top two players, and said that they will face days – such as Thompson’s recent play against USC – when they struggle.
“One day you’re the hero, the next day your teammates better be heroes because it’s just not your day, especially the guys at one and two,” Martin said. “It’s always a real war at those top spots.”
Martin emphasized how well the Trojans played on courts one and two, not having much to critique for Giron and said that Thompson’s Pac-12 champion opponent, senior Ray Sarmiento, submitted a performance as good as the UCLA coach has seen from the Trojan.
Thompson, now in the midst of a winless three-match stretch comprised of an indecision against Oregon bookended by straight-set losses to each of USC’s top players, tinkered with deviations from his typical serve and groundstroke. His experimentation led to less confidence in his play and consequently backfired: Martin saw how Sarmiento reaped the benefits of extended points and first-serve faults from Thompson.
“I regret not being able to help out my team a little more because I went down a couple of times. … But those losses, I really grew from,” Thompson said.
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UCLA’s intra-team scrimmage ended with a tie, as the teams wound up winning the same amount of sets. No player had to pay for another’s delivered food. Though Saturday night saw wallets fuller than expected and whetted competitive appetites, Giron recognizes that his team will not be satisfied unless it redeems last year’s national title loss.
“There’s only one thing that’s going to satisfy our hunger,” Giron said. “We’re all excited and know what we want to do.”