After the rest of his players had gone into the locker room following Monday afternoon’s practice, UCLA men’s tennis coach Billy Martin grabbed a basket of balls, lobbing them over the net to sophomore Nick Meister, who countered each with a powerful cross-court drive.
Meister was scratched from the lineup of the Pac-10 Championships a week and a half ago because his asthma had acted up, which coincided with a cold to make things worse.
But watching the quickness of his footwork in this practice session, it would seem that he has not skipped a beat.
“He’s been able to work hard and play three hours of tennis, which is just what he needs,” Martin said. “I mean there’s no harder worker on our team than Nick.”
That last statement is of course debatable, as the Bruins’ roster this season has been filled with so many similar hard-luck, hard-fought story lines.
Over the course of the spring season, three of UCLA’s normal starters have missed multiple matches because of injury, not to mention other player absences stemming from academic issues and trips halfway across the globe for national team tennis competition.
Remarkably, through all this, the Bruins (17-4, 6-0 Pac-10) still managed to close out the regular season with 10 straight wins, going undefeated in Pac-10 competition to win the conference title. With this record, they were given the national No. 7 seed and were thus selected to host an NCAA regional competition, a section of the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament to take place at UCLA’s own Los Angeles Tennis Center starting this Friday.
“We beat some really good teams with two or three guys out of the lineup,” redshirt junior Haythem Abid said. “We’ve got everybody playing at NCAAs … so we’ll see how good it’s going to be.”
Abid himself was a victim of injury, but despite returning from a hurt ankle, still managed to win the clinching match in UCLA’s conference championship showdown against rival USC, two weeks ago. It had been a tough decision for Martin to play Abid. Knowing his former-No. 1 player was not at full strength, Martin was forced to possibly sacrifice the future for the present.
“It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to play him against ‘SC,” Martin said. “But I don’t think I could have kept him out really and he did an unbelievable job for us.”
As his recovery continues, Abid claims he is now at close to 90 percent healthy. Just this week he was selected as one of the 48 at-large bids ““ and the only male Bruin ““ to participate in the NCAA Individual Singles tournament that will take place once the team’s season has concluded.
One of the team’s senior captains, Harel Srugo, whose hand injury has pushed him to the sidelines on multiple occasions this year, provided the positive outlook the team has taken:
“We are coming into this tournament thinking that the bad things are behind us and the good things are ahead of us. Even though we had to deal with so many things, we still had a pretty good season. We’re coming into the NCAAs thinking that everyone is good now, in both a good mental and physical state.”