Men’s tennis finished their second tournament of the season on Sunday, Sept. 15 at the Hope Invitational in Holland, Michigan, finishing with nine total wins and only one loss. Men’s tennis coach Samantha Schall said it was a good tournament overall.

“It was a good weekend and another good experience for the team,” Schall said. “They got to play a lot of matches. The first day we had some rain in the morning so we got started a little bit late but the guys did a good job of handling some adversity after being thrown out into a difficult situation in this tournament.”

When asked to summarize the tournament in a few words, Schall described the Hope Invitational as simultaneously quiet and chaotic.

“As a coach, it’s a tough atmosphere to navigate. I coach the Men’s and Women’s teams, so at a tournament like this I do a lot of running around trying to make sure everyone has everything they need and everything is running smoothly,” Schall said. “At the same time, it was a little bit calmer than last weekend because there weren’t as many total players.”

During the hectic tournament, Schall was happy with how her team handled the delays and that they played hard despite playing extended days.

“A lot of the matches were delayed,” Schall said. “So they had to play three singles matches in one day which is a pretty hard thing to do,”

Despite the delays, the GVSU Men’s Tennis team had success in singles over the weekend, whereas last weekend they had most of their success in doubles play.

“We had a lot of success in singles matches,” Schall said. “We didn’t lose a singles match that wasn’t against each other, so we made our way through the draws and the only times that we lost was against our teammates in the finals and semi-finals. I was very happy with our performance in singles so we got some good results there.”

Senior Jack Geissler had a good tournament in Holland. He is one of only two seniors on the team and the experience of the 2018 GLIAC Second Team selection definitely showed over the weekend.

“Jack ended up winning the top draw and he beat his teammate DJ (Colantone), so that was a pretty good result,” Schall said. “That’s the good thing about these tournaments, is that if you do good enough then you end up meeting your teammates in the draw, which happened a lot for us this weekend.”

The Hope Invitational and University of Wisconsin – Whitewater Invitational were good practice for the GVSU Men’s Tennis team as they head for their true goal: winning the ITA Championships. Coach Schall thinks the team made good strides toward achieving their goal this past weekend.

“I think we have definitely had success in these tournaments so far and gotten a lot of good experience. We’ve played more matches over the last few weekends than we would have if we were just playing team matches so that’s been good,” Schall said. “Just to be in that tournament format is really helpful as we get ready for the ITA Championships. Getting the match play under our belt has been good but there’s still some things that we want to work on and we want to figure out before ITA’s, which is plenty of time to get some good practice in and hopefully have a really good tournament when we host it in two weeks.”