Clay Thompson survives a thrilling finals match to win the Southern California Intercollegiate
Sophomore Clay Thompson defeated Brigham Young’s Patrick Kawka in the finals of the Southern California Intercollegiate Championships.
By Daily Bruin Staff
Nov. 8, 2011 12:38 a.m.
Upsets, thrilling comebacks and stormy weather found their way to the courts at UCLA’s Los Angeles Tennis Center this past week for the 55th Southern California Intercollegiate Championships.
UCLA sophomore, third-seeded Clay Thompson, defeated Patrick Kawka of Brigham Young 7-5, 6-4, in an electrifying tournament championship match. Thompson was down 5-4 in the first set and 4-2 in the second before coming back to win both.
“This is huge. Coming into this I felt like I was in the “˜sophomore slump,'” Thompson said. “I was ranked pretty high coming in. “¦ So, I think this was really huge for my confidence, “¦ just to reinforce the fact that I know I can play at a high level.”
In order to reach the finals, Thompson upset top-seeded Yannick Hanfmann of USC 6-3, 6-2. He started off the match down 2-0 and 3-1, but rallied back to win the next five games and take the set. He took the final five games of the match to claim his spot in the finals.
In the other semifinal match, redshirt junior Alex Brigham was defeated 6-4, 6-2 by Kawka and was frustrated with the errors that he made.
“Just little mistakes kind of set me back, but other than that it was a pretty good match,” Brigham said.
In doubles action, UCLA’s second-seeded team, Thompson and Brigham, fell to top-seeded USC team of Hanfmann and Emilio Gomez 8-4 in the championship match. The duo was supposed to play BYU’s Kawka and Georgy Batrakov in the semifinals but automatically advanced to the finals since BYU does not allow its players to compete on Sundays.
“It was nice to get a spot in the finals just like that, but it definitely didn’t help us in the actual finals,” Thompson said.
A rainstorm passed through UCLA on Friday that caused multiple lengthy delays during the singles quarterfinals. Thompson’s match against Keaton Cullimore of BYU and Brigham’s match against fifth-seeded Janosch Apelt of Azusa Pacific were suspended until Saturday morning.
“The key is you’ve got to be mentally tough when you got those rain delays. You’ve got to stay focused and not try to let it bother you, because your opponent has to go through the same thing,” Brigham said.
Both Thompson and Brigham were able to stick through it and defeat their opponents 6-4, 7-6(5) and 7-6(2), 6-7(4), 6-2 respectively to move on to the semifinals. Junior, fourth-seeded Warren Hardie was able to complete his match during a stop of the rain on Friday, but he couldn’t get the victory as he fell 7-6(3), 6-3 to Kawka.
“The rain delays were awful. It was impossible to keep momentum. I had my chances, I had the first set 5-3 and the rain came and I blew it,” Hardie said. “I had never seen him play like that so props to him, but the rain was a big factor.”
Despite getting knocked out in the quarterfinals, Hardie’s round of 16 match against Pepperdine’s David Sofaer was the most thrilling of the whole tournament. Hardie dropped the first set and fought off four match points in the second-set tiebreaker before eventually coming back to win 2-6, 7-6(11), 6-3.
“I wasn’t really thinking about the win ““ I was just thinking about at that point, you’re down so much, it’s kind of if worse comes to worst, I might lose, so at that point I was playing pretty loose and I was just ripping and happening to make all my shots, and I was pretty aggressive “¦ and didn’t lose the last point,” Hardie said.
Other Bruin players in the main singles draw included freshman Dennis Mkrtchian and junior Michael Hui. Mkrtchian lost 6-2, 6-7(4), 6-3 to BYU’s fifth-seeded Batrakov in the round of 16, while Hui was defeated 6-2, 6-0 by fifth-seeded Benjamin Recknagel of UC Santa Barbara in the round of 32.
“I had a tough day on the court,” Hui said after the loss. “I had trouble with a lot of routine shots. “¦ I had the wrong strategy pretty much, wrong mentality.”
In the main doubles draw, Gernot Hagemann and Bruno Santarelli of Concordia knocked out Hardie and Mkrtchian in the quarterfinals 9-8(6). Hui and redshirt junior Evan Lee lost 8-4 to Apelt and Jochem Hoefnagels of Azusa Pacific in the round of 16.
The Bruins do not play again until the National Collegiate Tennis Classic in mid-January.
