For an LSU men’s tennis team as young and with as much potential as this one, it’s expected that each year would be a step up or two. Remaining on the same step as last season would be a bitter disappointment for both coaches and players, and could eventually lead to negative progression due to a drop in confidence.
The Tigers had their first taste of competition this past weekend, having two players attend the Milwaukee Classic and the rest of the team play at the Alabama Four in the Fall Invitational, and they produced much of the same positives and negatives they produced last season.
There were lots of wins in doubles and not nearly enough in singles, with the Tigers almost winning twice as many doubles matches as singles matches despite playing twice as many matches in singles (9/13 in doubles and 5/28 in singles). Those numbers aren’t just troubling; they’re daunting, and the team cannot be expected to win more matches this season with performances like that.
Being great at doubles is certainly a good thing, but it cannot be the only thing you have going for you. There were three matches last season in which the only point the Tigers scored was in doubles (versus Tulsa, Ole Miss and Tennessee), and there were a lot more losses that could have been prevented, had one or two players taken their courts in singles.
The team currently has a valid excuse—their roster is still young and lacking in experience—but that excuse loses its validity the longer these struggles continue. They performed similarly last fall, with greater competition and experience expectedly trumping them, but that gap that was between them and the other teams in the SEC and the rest of the country should be narrowing.
We haven’t seen that yet.
An example of positive progression in college tennis is Memphis, a team that dismantled LSU at the Alabama Four in the Fall in singles and ultimately surrendered just one win to the Bayou Bengals. Memphis went from a dismal 5-9 campaign in the 2019-20 season (a season in which they still managed to defeat LSU) to an adequate 9-7 campaign just one season later.
And that wasn’t due to an easier schedule either. Memphis defeated the likes of Ole Miss, Alabama and Middle Tennessee while also narrowly losing to Tulsa, Mississippi State, Wichita State and USF. They topped a season of progress with a first-round win in the NCAA Championships against Georgia Tech.
This team has a little more experience than LSU, but not that much, and they don’t come particularly close to LSU when it comes to recruiting. The Bayou Bengals could end up like Memphis with added experience, but it isn’t going to happen out of nowhere.
There were bright spots for LSU, but they came a lot more sparingly than the negatives. Ronnie Hohmann and Boris Kozlov each won matches at the Milwaukee Classic, which featured tough competition and only consisted of 64 players, and they managed to advance to the quarterfinals in doubles too.
Joao Graca, Ben Koch and newcomer Vlad Lobak all won a singles match at Four in the Fall and every player in attendance contributed to a doubles win. The positives are slim, but they are worth taking note of at the moment.
It’s still too early to form an accurate prediction on how this team will fare in the regular season, but the team hasn’t proven themselves yet. They will get more chances to later in the fall, but for now, all they can do is prepare.
