I must admit it was a bit of a strange feeling going into the matches at Whitworth. On Saturday PLU defeated Linfield 6-3 giving us the 2010 conference crown regardless of our results on Sunday. As a team we wanted to "win" the conference title by defeating Whitworth rather than another team losing. But that is the nature of sports.
In our first match against Whitworth I was planning on resting a few guys and splitting our singles up depending on how the doubles progressed. However Whitworth had other ideas and submitted their second squad into the line-up. After seeing this I pulled guys out of the singles line-up and played a different group of guys. This turned out to be fantastic because everyone got a chance to play on Sunday.
In the first match we won 9-0 without dropping a set. You can see the box scores here. Note the Whitworth SID got the #1 and #2 doubles doubles teams from Whitworth reserved.
After a quick lunch break we started match #2 with more normal line-ups. Going into the match we opted to rest #1 Matt Solomon, #3 Etienne Moshevich and #5 Christoph Fuchs. With half of our singles line-up out and our standout #1 doubles on the bench we knew we were in for a battle. Speaking of doubles, for this match Jeffrey Tolman and Nadeem Kassam played #1 doubles (they normally play #3). For the record Whitworth has played good doubles this year. In fact this year they have been up after doubles against the #2 team and #3 team in our conference (Linfield and Willamette).
I was quite pleased with our doubles results. At #1 Jeffrey and Nadeem won 8-5. This should give them some confidence going into the conference tournament know that they can beat any team in the conference. At #2 Christoph and Quin completed an undefeated conference season winning 8-6. I believe the Whitworth #2 doubles team had only lost 1 conference match going into Sunday. At #3 Thomas and Conor played unbelievable tennis winning 8-1.
Singles had its up and downs. At #1 Jeffrey played another streaky match. He lost the 1st set 6-2 (after going down 0-3 two breaks) but wins the 2nd 6-1. In the 3rd set he again goes down 0-3 but ends up winning 7-6 in the 3rd (7-2). Speaking of streaky Chris had a streaky match of his own. He was up 4-2 in the 1st but drops that set 6-4. Like Jeff he wins the 2nd set 6-1 but after being up in the 3rd he loses 7-5. Very disappointing loss for Chris.
Conor was very excited to be playing and even more excited when he found out he was playing #3! Conor had a wonderful spring break trip defeating the #6 from Pomona, the #5 from UC Santa Cruz and lost in a match tie-break to Cal Lu. Unfortunately he was sick last weekend and wasn't able to play in our last home matches. Against Whitworth he made up for lost time being the 1st off the court with a 6-2, 6-3 victory.
Much like Conor, Nadeem is excited to be back playing and posted a very good 6-4, 6-4 win over Whitworth's solid #4 player. Good for Nadeem to get through this competitive match. At #5 Sam won 7-6, 6-4 and Quin won 6-3, 6-1 at #6.
All in all a very good effort from the Fighting Squirrels. Certainly shows the depth of our team defeating the #5 team in our conference without our #1 doubles and half of our singles line-up.
With the regular conference season wrapped up we start the NWC conference tournament on Friday in Yakima. We go into the tournament as the #1 seed and face the winner of PLU/Whitworth Friday at 3:30.
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