By Kyle Jorrey
Sports Editor
What the Pepperdine men’s tennis team lacks in experience, they make up for in enthusiasm. With half its season finished, the young squad can look back on a two-month roller coaster ride that’s produced some big wins and some disappointing losses.
This past week was no different.
The Waves started out on a high Thursday by dominating a clearly less-talented team from Hawaii, 6-1. They followed it up by trouncing conference rival Loyola Marymount 7-0 the next day.
On Sunday they came up just short against the No. 3 team in the country, the Baylor Bears, and then on Wednesday they returned home to lose a heartbreaker to San Diego 4-3.
All said and done, the team is ready to enjoy its time off for Spring Break.
“I think it’s a perfect time,” Head Coach Adam Steinberg said. “We will get a chance to regroup, both physically and mentally, and try and put things together for the second half of the season.”
Things went bad for the Waves early against San Diego.
No. 1 doubles tandem, juniors Calle Hansen and Diego Acuna, coming off a hard-fought loss at Baylor, fell to Nic Beuque and Jason Pangsrikul 8-4. The surprising loss was difficult on the teams’ captains.
“We tried to be as fired up as we could, but things just didn’t go our way,” Hansen said. “I feel right now if we could play the match again I would do a lot of things differently ….We are a much better doubles team, and a better team as whole than San Diego, and I think we came down to their level.”
After freshmen Pedro Rico and Scott Doerner collected a win at No. 2 doubles, Pepperdine lost the point when Alexis Rafidison and Kevin Borzenski dropped their match in No. 3 doubles.
“When San Diego won the doubles point it changed the complexion of the entire match,” Steinberg said.
Down a point, things didn’t start much better in singles as freshman Ali Fehmi lost the opening match to Nick Caldwell at No. 6 singles. With the score at 2-0, Pepperdine began to show the Toreros that they weren’t going to go down that easily, especially at home.
Doerner won his match at No. 4 doubles 7-6, 6-2, over Rob Blair, just in time to watch Hansen knock off his opponent 6-1, 6-2 in energetic fashion.
At No. 3 singles, two players with similar styles faced off in the best match of the day. Rico, who has yet to show he can consistently win for the Waves, played fearless and inspired tennis against Beuque. In a match that featured an entertaining vocal battle, Rico won in three games, 6-4, 2-6, 6-3.
“The guys try so hard, the effort is great,” Steinberg said. “People care and want to win, I just think we get tight when we play teams ranked lower than us, and then we play down to their level.”
The door came slamming shut after the day’s final two matches. Acuna lost a difficult match to Pierrick Ysern after winning the first set 6-1. Ysern battled back in the next two games as the Pepperdine junior faltered. He went on to win the match1-6, 6-3, 6-3.
The loss rested the match’s decision on Rafidison at No. 5 singles. In another high-energy matchup, Rafidison fought from behind to take the second game before losing to Mirza Koristovic 6-4, 1-6, 6-4.
Afterwards, both players and coaches took the defeat hard.
“Today was a bad loss for us, that was a team we should beat,” Steinberg said. “He gave it away, and I think we should be mad at ourselves. It’s definitely a disappointing loss.”
Things may have been worse because the team was coming off playing some its best tennis of the season against Baylor. Hansen, who dropped his first singles match of the season against the No. 1 singles player in the country Benedikt Dorsch, said he was very happy with the team’s performance at Baylor.
“It was probably, attitude wise, one of our best matches so far,” Hansen said. “Everyone was so fired up. “We dominated the atmosphere.”
Doerner said in order to get things back on track, the Waves need to focus on playing their brand of tennis.
“We need to keep going for our shots and attacking all the time,” Doerner said. “That’s our style of play and that’s how we’re going to win.
“If we keep believing in ourselves and keep our attack style up, than I think we can definitely beat any team on any given day,” he continued.
Hansen said it’s critical the team start to learn how to play when under the gun.
“It’s easy to play against a team like Baylor when you have nothing to lose,” Hansen said. “We need to win these matches when we’re under pressure, and when we lose the doubles point and have to fight back.”
After playing four matches in seven days, the battle-worn members of the tennis team can now look forward to almost two weeks off before playing Texas A & M March 3.
Once they return though, Hansen said they return to undertake the important mission of maintaining a long-standing Pepperdine tradition of successful tennis.
“This team has a lot to prove,” the junior said. “A lot of people didn’t believe that we were going to be any good this year, and we’ve done a good job so far, but we have to keep it going. Pepperdine has a tradition of being a great tennis school, and we don’t want people to forget that …We really want to prove Pepperdine is still the best team in the West Coast Conference.”
February 20, 2003