Capkovic loses in ITA semifinals

After a long day of waiting and cheering for teammates, second-seeded junior Peter Capkovic took the court at 8 p.m. Saturday for his first match of the Wilson/ITA Northeast Regional Men's Tennis Championships, held this weekend at Jadwin Gym. The excruciatingly long delay failed to keep Capkovic from steamrolling his opponent. In fact, Capkovic had little trouble until he reached the semifinals, where he fell to Harvard's Dan Nguyen. Sophomore Melissa Saiontz played in the women's half of the tournament, held at Old Dominion University, and fell in the quarterfinals.

The first set of Capkovic's first match, against Kiril Kolomytes of Buffalo, lasted just over 20 minutes — about as much time as two players from Penn State and Stony Brook needed to complete two games on the next court over — as Capkovic blasted serves and used his trademark jumping drive backhand to take a 6-1 lead. For Kolomytes, frustration quickly turned to desperation as he tried everything, from counterpunching to net rushing, to keep the match competitive.

Anything he threw at Capkovic was returned harder and flatter. Serving down 1-5 in the second set, after scrambling to return a pair of cross-court groundstrokes to opposite ends of the court, he managed to run down Capkovic's angled backhand volley. He threw his racquet toward the ball, which miraculously made its way over the net and back to Capkovic, who then dropped the ball into open court to win the match 6-1, 6-1.

His next opponent, Sebastien Dietz of SUNY Binghamton, gave Capkovic some problems with his big serve and counter-punching ground strokes. He ended up taking the first set, 6-4. After that warm-up, Capkovic raised his energy level and started taking the ball earlier off the ground. For most of the second and third sets, he dictated play with his aggressive and piercing ground game. His serve pushed his opponent farther and farther behind the baseline, where he was left scrambling to pick up Capkovic's shots. The Slovakian surrendered only one game in the final two sets and ended up winning 4-6, 6-1, 6-0.

Capkovic's meteoric run through the brackets ended when he faced Dan Nguyen of Harvard. Nguyen, despite being a full six inches shorter than his opponent , handled Capkovic's groundstrokes surprisingly well and used his frustrating counter-punch game to wear Capkovic down. He gained a quick start by taking the first set, 6-0. Capkovic rallied back in the second set, managing to take an early break by moving his opponent side-to-side and rushing the net to finish off the point quickly. Serving at 5-4 for the second set, a nervous Capkovic made a pair of unforced errors and was broken. He ended up losing the second serve and the match 6-0, 7-5.

Three rounds earlier, Nguyen barely escaped a 7-6 (6), 7-6 (6) scare by Princeton junior Alex Krueger-Wyman. Krueger-Wyman used the one-two combination of his textbook-like serve and fluid volleys to keep Nguyen on the run. Ultimately, Nguyen's consistency and effective serving game kept him in the match. In one game, when Krueger-Wyman was serving down 4-5 in the second set, Nguyen returned two overhead smashes from Krueger-Wyman before throwing up a third lob that went wide. After fighting his way to level the score at 6-6, Krueger-Wyman surrendered two double faults in the tiebreak, allowing his opponent to take the match.

In doubles, the top-seeded team of sophomore George Carpeni and Krueger-Wyman were upset in their first match by the Delaware squad of Nolan Greenberg and Austin Longarce, 8-5. The unseeded Tiger team of sophomore Ilya Trubov and freshman Ryan Kim took out Phil Garabedian and Partick Cerutti of St. Joe's (8-3) before upsetting the 11th seed, Yale's Michael Caldwell and Connor Dawson (8-5).

Capkovic later teamed up with junior Alex Vuckovic to make an impressive run to the semifinals, taking out teams from Farleigh Dickson (9-7), Dartmouth (8-5) and Brown (8-4) before running into the seventh seeded team of Justin Chow and Bogden Borta from Columbia in the semifinals. Chow and Borta beat the pair from Princeton 8-6 before going on to win the doubles draw in the finals.

The women's team also participated in the Northeast section of the Wilson/ITA tournament, held this weekend at Old Dominion University. Saiontz, seeded seventh in the tournament, cruised through her round of 16 match against the No. 26 seed Charlie Tansill of Penn 7-6, 6-1, to take on second seeded Tatsiana Uvarova of Virginia Commonwealth University in the quarters. After rallying to a 6-2 win against the Belarusian Fed Cup player, Saiontz dropped the second two sets and lost the match 6-2, 4-6, 2-6.