After taking a 3-0 match lead, the LSU men’s tennis team suffered its first home loss of the season, 4-3, to No. 13 Ole Miss on Friday evening at W.T. “Dub” Robinson Stadium.
The Tigers (14-4, 4-3 Southeastern Conference) captured the doubles point and won the first two completed singles points, but the Rebels (13-5, 5-2 SEC) rallied in the final four singles matches, including a clutch win from their highest ranked player in the final singles match, to hand LSU its third top-25 loss of the season.
The Tigers’ home winning streak ended at 13 matches.
“It was one of those [matches] it had a sense that we’re going to have something special tonight. Ultimately, it just didn’t happen,” said LSU coach Jeff Brown. “It wasn’t the last match on that was the difference. We just didn’t play well in some other spots that kind of forced it to come down to that situation.”
LSU took the doubles point for the 15th time on the year with wins from the duo of senior Chris Simpson and sophomore Justin Butsch, 6-3, and the No. 18 doubles pair of junior Boris Arias and sophomore Jordan Daigle, 6-4.
Arias followed his doubles win with a dominant straight-sets win in singles against senior William Kallberg, 6-2, 6-3. The Tigers appeared to be coasting to victory after a 6-3, 6-3 singles win from Butsch, but Ole Miss sophomore Vinod Gowda put the Rebels on the board with 6-3, 6-2 win against junior Andrew Korinek.
Ole Miss freshman Gustav Hansson then took down junior Tam Trinh in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4, and Simpson fell in his singles match against junior Stefan Lindmark, 6-7, 5-7, to even the overall score at three.
The overall match came down to the final singles match between Daigle and Ole Miss senior Nik Scholtz, the No. 15 singles player in the nation. Although Daigle had 5-4 lead in the third set, Scholtz won the next two games, fending off a match point in the first game, to take 6-5 lead.
Daigle won the 12th game of the set to send the match into a tiebreaker, but Scholtz provided the overall match clincher, winning the tiebreaker 7-2 to complete a 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 singles victory.
“As recently as last week, we’ve had one of those [close matches] go for us,” Brown said. “We’ve had several of those go our way. In a season like this against quality teams week in and week out, you’re going to win some of those, and they’re going to get some. They came up with some great shots under pressure, and we did as well. But with the way the scoring is, you stop at six-all and play a tiebreaker. Somebody has got to win and somebody has got to lose.”
LSU now turns to its final home weekend match of the season against Arkansas at 1:00 p.m. Sunday.
“If they’re the 13th best team, then we’re one point from being 13, basically,” Brown said. “We’ve had a lot of good wins and we’ve got a lot of stuff ahead of us. This Arkansas match on Sunday is a huge match. I had the same speech prepared win or lose [after today’s match] as far as how important Sunday is going to be, and it doesn’t change.”
