Men's tennis ends season with close loss to Penn

The Princeton’s Men’s tennis team capped off its regular season with a tough loss against Penn. After grabbing a pair of victories against Yale and Brown to open the Ivy League season earlier this month, the Tigers faced an onslaught of fierce competition within their own conference and finished at an underwhelming 2-5.

Heading into the weekend’s action against Penn, the Tigers were looking to redeem themselves after they had dropped four consecutive matches against Ivy League opponents. The previous weekend saw a decisive beating at the hands of the Columbia Lions (who wrapped up their third straight Ivy title) and a gut-wrenching loss against Cornell. With the score level at 3-3, the match came down to junior Josh Yablon’s encounter against Cornell’s Casares Rosa. Though Yablon was up a break 4-1 in the decider, Rosa mounted an impressive comeback to steal the match for the Big Red. Needless to say, the Tigers were hungry for redemption in their final match.

Action in Philadelphia commenced at 1 p.m. with a set of tight doubles matches. Although things were looking good for the Tigers on Court 3 with captains Yablon and Tom Colautti up a break 5-3, Penn proved too strong on courts 1 and 2 and captured the all important doubles point. On Court 1, the 76th nationally ranked pair of junior Alex Day and sophomore Luke Gamble fell 6-4, while sophomore standout Diego Vives and junior partner Jonathan Carcione lost control of their match after Carcione was broken on a deuce point at 3-3.

Having found themselves in this position several times before, the Tigers looked to switch gears in singles play and bounce back — their mission seemed promising at first, as the first three singles matches to end all went Princeton’s way. The singles matches were fiercely contested, as 5 out of 6 went to three sets, four of which included tiebreakers. The only player to win in straight sets was Princeton’s Gamble, who sailed comfortably, 6-3, 6-3. Day was the second Tiger to complete his match, winning 6-3, 0-6, 7-6. The third set was a seesaw affair with Day and Penn’s Josh Pompan trading breaks twice in the middle of the set before going to the tiebreaker, where Day prevailed.

Vives ran into some trouble early on in his match, dropping his serve immediately, but recovered well and snagged the first. In the second, after trailing early, he fought hard to level the score at 5-5, only to be broken again by Penn’s Vim de Alwis who ended up taking the second 7-5. Vives however did not let the momentum swing the Quaker’s way, as he took control early on in the decider 4-0, en route to a 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 victory that gave the Tigers a 3-1 edge.

The other three matches of Yablon, Colautti and freshman Jimmy Wasserman all went to third set tiebreakers that these Tigers unfortunately lost. Yablon and Colautti both started strong, grabbing the opener, before faltering in the latter stages, while Wasserman’s comeback didn’t come to fruition. Yablon even pushed through some tough pressure moments, such as serving at 15-30 at 5-6 in third set, only to lose in the breaker. With the three singles matches lost all coming through tiebreakers, this match was unbelievably close and just within the grasp of the Tigers’ outstretched hands.

Colautti looked back on the season as a whole that ended less fortunately than what the team expected, stating, “Well, I think the biggest for me is if you look at the results of the matches we lost, we lost three matches 4-3 and were in the position to win those. So the biggest positive is that we weren’t really outplayed by any teams in the Ivy League this year despite our disappointing record.” Colautti’s assessment is accurate, as many of the matches were close, and the Tigers were never really outmatched by any opponent. Looking ahead to next year, Colautti is optimistic: “We return all of our starting players next year and gain some new guys that hopefully will bring a different dynamic. Another positive is that we can only really improve come next year when we also will be able to play most of our difficult matches at home.”