Santa Clara defeated the LSU in a close battle on the courts Friday night. The match had everything one could want in a tennis match.
However, only one team could prevail tonight and that was the Broncos from Santa Clara.
LSU looked to have the upper hand when the match was tied three all. LSU freshman Eric Samuelsson lead 6-5 in the third set against Santa Clara’s Vasileios Iliopoulous, but Illiopoulous caught a lucky break when his return ball grazed the top of the net barely crossing over the onto the other side of the court, sending the set into a tiebreaker.
Illiopoulous would go onto win the tiebreaker 7-4, giving Santa Clara the win 4-3 over the Tigers.
“I’ve been on both sides of these kind of matches, and it’s a lot more fun to be on the side that [Santa Clara] was on tonight,” head coach Jeff Brown said. “They were hungry, and they came in and responded pretty well after losing the doubles point pretty decisively.”
The Tigers dominated the doubles matches, winning two matches before the third match’s conclusion. In doubles, LSU was led by freshman Julian Saborio and junior Gabor Csonka. The duo swept their opponents 6-0.
Csonka’s great performance in the doubles match did not carry over in his singles match, losing straight sets 5-7 and 1-6.
Brown pointed to disappointing performances from upperclassmen like Csonka’s as something they can not have if they want to compete consistently.
“We certainly feel that we didn’t get a great performance out of a few guys that we’ve come to count on,” Brown said. “But it certainly shouldn’t have to come down to [freshman Eric Samuelsson] who just got here in January.”
“We should have been able to handle it with some of the other guys that didn’t have as good of a night. It is easy for us to take away a lot of things from tonight that we need to work on.”
It was not all bad for the Tigers tonight, as Nikola Samardzic won his match in extremely close fashion. The sophomore from New York won straight sets after both went into a tiebreaker. He currently leads the Tigers with 14 wins in singles play on the season.
In a night where most of the breaks went Santa Clara’s way Samardzic’s victory seemed to be the only one that bounced LSU’s way.
LSU freshman Rafael Wagner lost straight sets by scores of 6-7 to Santa Clara’s Jesus Barajas.
When asked about the close losses, Brown was disappointed, but thought the Tigers had opportunities to gain a victory.
“It was a strange day” Brown said. “We did a couple [breaks] on court 2, but it seemed like the other ones were going against us. We had our chances, there is really no one point we can point to except for the match point ball hitting the tape and bouncing over.”
“We got into that position, and there is some things we could have done to avoid that.”
LSU is 1-3 on the season and will continue its five-match homestand against North Florida, Friday February 10th at the LSU Tennis Complex at 4 p.m.
