Men’s tennis set to score spot in Indoors Championships

A road to winter’s biggest tennis tournament runs adjacent to Bruin Walk once more. Three schools — Wisconsin, Nebraska and Texas Tech — will visit UCLA in the Los Angeles Tennis Center this weekend to vie for a spot in next month’s National Team Indoors Championship. A win over the Badgers on Saturday would grant the Bruins a Sunday meeting against the winner of the Cornhuskers-Red Raiders match.

UCLA received the option to host qualifying matches this weekend by virtue of finishing among the nation’s top 15 teams last year. The Bruins finished No. 2 in 2013 and open this dual-match season with the same ranking. Visiting teams in the qualifying rounds chose their destinations, which has always included UCLA in the six years of the format, in an order reflective of their final rank the previous year. The winners from each of 15 qualifying sites will join National Indoor Championship host Texas A&M; in Houston next month.see link 4” class=”inline-comment collapsed”>

Becoming familiar with single-game elimination situations just two matches into the season should prove useful, according to coach Billy Martin, for a team sporting freshmen in half of its singles spots.

“Every day there’s a new hero and every day there’s a guy that feels like he’s the goat,” Martin said. He went on to say that players need to learn how to prevent rough performances from bleeding over into the next day.

Team matches on consecutive days this weekend represent just a fraction of the physical and psychological endurance needed to win the National Indoors Team Championship. The victor of the mid-February tournament would have to win a match on four consecutive days.see link 1” class=”inline-comment collapsed”>

Redshirt sophomore Karue Sell said that dual-match tournaments boast both the highest stakes and most fun experiences in college tennis.

“(Teams) have to win four or five straight matches … we usually do win like four to five matches in a row during the season, but they’re just for our record. They don’t bring any titles,” Sell said. “(At tournaments), everyone plays more fired up.”

Last year’s Bruins coasted through their qualifying rounds with 4-0 and 6-1 wins over Cal Poly and Brigham Young.see link 2” class=”inline-comment collapsed”> A UCLA roster more front-loadedok” class=”inline-comment collapsed”> than that of its visitors may produce similar results in 2014. Besides UCLA, only Texas Tech boasts singles players ranked in the nation’s top 125, with their top player ranked No. 65ok” class=”inline-comment collapsed”> and sitting behind four Bruins. In all, two Red Raiders are ranked in the top 125.ok, checked with writer” class=”inline-comment collapsed”>

Scoring victories on Saturday and Sunday would propel the Bruins into what junior Dennis Mkrtchian considers the only tournament of the dual-match season, other than the NCAA championship, to assemble the nation’s best teams.

Mkrtchian said that last year’s 4-3 indoors championship semifinal loss to USCsee link 3” class=”inline-comment collapsed”> brought out the best in a two-loss Bruins team that won 20 straight matches before falling one set short of an NCAA title.

“We thought we were better than them, and that pushed us to play better, strive for better results,” Mkrtchian said. “I think that’s why we went on that long undefeated streak, because we knew we were the best team in the nation … so why lose?”