The No. 14 LSU men’s tennis team will face its toughest competition of the season when they travel to Columbus, Ohio to face No. 3 Ohio State on Sunday.”We’re really excited about the challenge,” said LSU assistant coach Danny Bryan. “Obviously they’re a good team — No. 3 in the country right now. We’re going in thinking we can win, and we’re going to get a chance to matchup against some of the best in the country.”The Buckeyes provide a challenge for LSU, boasting five ranked singles players including: Bryan Koniecko (No. 4), Steven Moneke (No. 22), Justin Kronauge (No. 23), Balazs Novak (No. 63) and Shuhei Uzawa (No. 82). Senior Michael Venus is the only ranked singles player for LSU coming in at No. 5. Although the Tigers do have a couple of highly ranked doubles teams.The duo of Venus and freshman Neal Skupski are the No. 9 doubles team in the nation, and senior James Clusky and freshman Julien Gauthier come in at No. 53.Bryan said his team is familiar with the Buckeyes from recently playing them so often.    “We played them the last four or five years, and it’s the same team as last year,” Bryan said. “So we’ve seen them before.”Cluskey said his team has has had a good week of practice and is ready to go.”We feel pretty good coming off a good win against Rice,” Cluskey said. “We’re excited about getting to go play a good team on the road with nothing really to lose. We’re pretty familiar with some of the guys on Ohio State’s team, and they play Notre Dame on Saturday so we’ll actually get to watch.”Venus said he is also looking forward to playing some guys he is familiar with.”We’ve had some good practices the last two weeks, and everybody’s pretty excited for it,” Venus said. “I played Moneke last year and lost, and I know Bryan [Koniecko] and Justin [Kronauge] from juniors.”The match begins at 11 a.m. at the Stickney Tennis Center.——Contact Tyler Harvey at [email protected]