Taking a glance at the LSU men’s tennis team’s Southeastern Conference slate on paper, one may be fooled into thinking it struggled down the stretch.
After a 4-2 start in the league, the Tigers (16-7, 6-6 SEC) went 2-4 to finish, dropping the final two matches of the year. But five of their six conference losses came to teams currently ranked in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association top 25, and the Tigers went scoreless in only one match against SEC regular season champion No. 6 Texas A&M. 
“Winning and losing isn’t always the indicator of how well you’re playing,” said LSU coach Jeff Brown.
But as the seventh-seeded Tigers head to the Aggies home in College Station, Texas, for the SEC Tournament, which begins today at 9 a.m. against tenth-seeded South Carolina, Brown’s club is more focused on the present.
Despite LSU’s losses to Texas A&M on April 9 — which Brown acknowledged may have been a result of the Tigers running “on fumes” — and Mississippi State on April 12, Brown said the recent losses shouldn’t have a bearing on their performance in the tournament.
“We’ve played so many at this point in the year that every match is separated pretty quickly from whether you’ve won or lost,” Brown said. “We’re certainly focused on our next match against South Carolina. We’ve got to play better than the last time we played against them, and we’re looking forward to that. 
“The focus has been on adding to our résumé more than it’s been thinking about anything in the past.”
LSU faltered in doubles for only the second time on the year in its March 6 meeting with the Gamecocks (15-14, 3-9 SEC), dropping its first SEC match of the year, 4-1. But the circumstances were a bit different in their lone non-top-25 conference loss.
Due to temperatures dropping below 50 degrees, the match was played at the Gamecocks’ indoor facility, an environment LSU hadn’t had much experience playing in. 
“It’s not so much that [South Carolina] is necessarily better indoors or outdoors,” Brown said. “But they were better than we were at the time indoors. It was just a unique situation with them having only four courts. They designed their team around that aspect a little bit more than we have. Whether they intentionally have or not, that’s just a natural situation for them … They put a lot of pressure on you to try to get the doubles point.”
The Tigers are aiming to start fast in doubles this time around against the Gamecocks, starting with the No. 20 doubles team of Jordan Daigle and Boris Arias. As a team, the Tigers are 16-7 in doubles points this season but have dropped the last four doubles points, leading to a 1-4 overall match record in that span. 
Today’s match was originally scheduled for noon but moved up because of impending weather in the area. At the time of print, the forecast calls for 35 percent chance of rain at 9 a.m.
With a lineup that’s “as healthy as they’ve been all year,” the Tigers hope to capture their first SEC Championship since 1999.
“I don’t feel there’s really been many points in the season where we’ve not been completely dialed in,” Brown said. “There’s been a match or two, but I think this team is playing pretty well right now.”
You can reach James Bewers on Twitter @JamesBewers_TDR.