Expectations and actual results are two very different
things.
And ever since the beginning of the season, UCLA men’s
tennis coach Billy Martin has been reminding his team of that
fact.
Some expectations were met with results on Sunday, as the
seventh-seeded Bruins (23-3) booked a spot in the Sweet 16 of the
NCAA Tournament with a hard-fought 4-2 victory over California
(12-10) at the Los Angeles Tennis Center.
“From day one we talk about that we’ve got to earn
it,” Martin said. “We’ve got to strive for that.
We still have to go out and win, and there will always be someone
trying to knock us off.”
On Sunday, that stiff challenge came from Cal, who defeated the
Bruins 4-3 in the last meeting between the teams in Berkeley. On
Sunday, the Bears again played like a team that was unimpressed by
the fact that UCLA has advanced at least as far as the
quarterfinals in the last 16 seasons.
That staggering statistic is the reason why a Bruin victory in
the regionals is always expected. But when the teams took the court
Sunday, it became abundantly clear that it is no guarantee.
“When it’s regional time, we don’t want to
lose there,” sophomore Benjamin Kohlloeffel said. “And
we’re favored. There’s always more pressure than there
actually should be, but it’s the same every year.”
The intensity of the match was evident from the beginning, with
the tournament life of each team at risk, and the Bruins out to
prove that the last loss to Cal was a fluke.
“I was quite nervous about the match,” said Martin,
who admitted that his team doesn’t match up very well against
Cal. “I wasn’t overly confident at all.”
UCLA needed a tiebreak victory from Kohlloeffel and teammate
Philipp Gruendler at the No. 2 doubles position to secure the
doubles point after Luben Pampoulov and Chris Lam had cruised to an
8-3 victory at the No. 3 position.
The doubles point was critical, as Cal and UCLA split the first
four singles matches to finish. Kohlloeffel, ranked No. 11,
defeated Lennart Mack, 6-2, 6-2, at the No. 2 singles position,
while senior Alberto Francis continued his impressive run of tennis
with a 7-5, 6-1 win over Tyler Browne at the No. 5 spot.
But losses from Pampoulov and Gruendler (Courts 1 and 6) forced
the match’s focus to Courts 3 and 4, where Kris Kwinta and
Lam were attempting to end the Bears’ season and extend their
own.
It was Lam who got the victory in the end, recovering from a
first-set setback to win 5-7, 6-2, 6-2 and send the Bruins to a
Sweet 16 match against Tennessee on Saturday in College Station,
Texas.
“It’s great,” Lam said. “We’re
expected to make it, but it always feels good, especially in a
competitive match like this where it kind of came down to the
end.”
Though UCLA cruised to 4-0 victories in the second round of the
NCAA tournament the last two seasons, the team seems convinced that
a tough match like the one they experienced on Sunday can only be
beneficial in the end, especially because the Bruins didn’t
play a competitive dual match for a month leading up to their
first-round match against Manhattan.
“It’s good for us to play in these situations where
we’re under pressure,” Lam said. “We’ve
just got to keep building after each match, because each match gets
tougher and tougher.”