It was a rough weekend for LSU’s tennis programs.
LSU’s men traveled to Athens, Ga., on Saturday for a Southeastern Conference match with No. 8 Georgia, and the women hosted No. 23 Tulsa on Friday afternoon.
Neither team got a win.
The men fell, 7-0, while the women lost, 5-2.
Playing without injured senior Sebastian Carlsson, the Tigers dropped all three doubles matches, including court one where junior Neal Skupski was without Carlsson for the first time all year.
Skupski and fellow junior Mark Bowtell fell 8-4 to the No. 10 pair of Javier Garrapiz and Hernus Pieters.
Georgia’s Drake Bernstein and Wil Spencer, the nation’s No. 47 doubles team, edged LSU senior Julien Gauthier and sophomore Olivier Borsos, 9-8, to secure the doubles point.
The Bulldogs (13-3, 5-0) didn’t ease off the accelerator in singles.
Georgia won all six contests, dropping just two sets on the way to a 7-0 win.
“We played hard, and we had a lot of close matches,” said LSU men’s coach Jeff Brown. “In singles we were close in a lot of the first sets. We just weren’t able to close out any of them.”
Meanwhile, the Lady Tigers put a five-match win streak on the line against the Golden Hurricane at W.T. “Dub” Robinson Stadium.
Tulsa stormed out of the gates on all three doubles courts, taking quick 3-1 leads.
Bonnie Davidson and Michelle Farley buried LSU freshman Ariel Morton and sophomore Ebie Wilson, 8-4, to take a one-match lead.
Sophomore Keri Frankenberger and freshman Yvette Vlaar clawed back into their match, tying the score at six before Tulsa’s Ewa Szatkowska and Anastasia Erofeeva got a late break to win the match 8-6 and clinch the doubles point.
The winner of the doubles point has won all of LSU’s matches in 2011, and it held true on Friday.
Wilson disposed of Farley, 6-1, 6-0, to even the match at 1-1.
LSU sophomore Kaitlin Burns fell in straight sets, but Frankenberger knotted the match at two with a straight-set victory of her own.
After losing the first set, 6-4, LSU junior Whitney Wolf squared her match at a set a piece before dropping the decisive set to Alexandra Kichoutkin.
With Tulsa needing just one point to win the match, Vlaar and Morton forced third sets, but neither could muster a win, making the final score 5-2 in favor of Tulsa.
“We fought really hard out there today,” said LSU women’s coach Tony Minnis. “I give tons of credit to Tulsa. They played really well today, especially in doubles.”
 
 
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Contact Hunt Palmer at [email protected]