Saturday, May 15, 2010

Squirrel's Season Stymied

Our foray into the national tournament was ended at the hands of the #3 team in the nation and host Claremont. In doubles we never got our teeth into #2 and #3 doubles and quickly went down breaks. All the doubles ended with a minute of each other..first off was #3 Christoph Fuchs/Conor Holton-Burke who lost 8-4, next off was our number #2 team of Nadeem Kassam/Jeffrey Tolman who also lost 8-4, our #1 team of Matt Solomon/Etienne Moshevich had a several chances to break but ended up losing 8-6.

Down 0-3 against the #3 team in the nation isn't the way to start the singles. We had plenty of fight and spunk but couldn't pull out any singles victories. At #3 ET was a few points from winning his match (6-2, 5-1) but we dropped two singles matches (#2 Jeffrey Tolman and #6 Conor Holton-Burke) sealing the match 0-5.

I'm beginning to feel a bit jinxed about the national tournament. Each of the past 4 years our loses have been at the hands of the eventual regional champion (yesterday CMS defeated #6 UC Santa Cruz to win the West Regional).

Interesting story for the trip. Because of the short turn around time between team selection and the start of play there wasn't a flight available with enough seats for the entire team. To make the trip work Women's coach John Hein drove us to Pasco where part of the team was going to fly Pasco->Seattle->Ontario and the other part was going to fly Pasco->Denver->Ontario. However the Seattle flight was canceled due to mechanical problems. We were able to get four members of the team onto the Denver flight but three players had to stay in Pasco. Lucky Nadeem, ET, and Adriel all have extensive travel experience and were able to work their way to Ontario. However the trio didn't arrive until midnight which didn't allow them any practice time after a long day of travel.

Thus concludes the team season for the Fighting Squirrels. Great year for the team -- we once again won over 20 matches, went undefeated in conference play, won the NWC team tournament, and advanced to the NCAA tournament.

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