On the first of their two-day trip to Illinois last weekend, the Laker men’s tennis team battled it out with Southern Indiana University, falling victim to the team by a score of 8-1.

“I don’t think we played bad,” said head coach John Black. “They’re a very experienced team. Their entire team is juniors and seniors, and it definitely showed. We played pretty solid but we couldn’t quite take them.”

Coach John Black attributed the loss to an especially crushing defeat in the three doubles matches that were played that evening. Two of the doubles teams lost by a score of 8-2 , the first consisting of Marc Roesslein and Bryan Hodges, the second consisting of Josh Kazdan and Ben Delgado-Rochas. A third doubles team, Philipp Claus and Andrew Darrel, lost 8-3.

“Our team is very young,” Black said. “The doubles are a work in progress. We’ve been improving but we’ve got a lot of work to go. Most of the college players back in high school only played singles, with limited exposure to doubles. In high school the best players on the team played singles. To be a good doubles player, it almost takes instinct – you have to play with your partner a lot. It’s so quick that you don’t have time to think of what to do. You just need to play with your partner a lot and you need to play a lot of doubles to get it. “

Senior player Phillip Claus agreed with coach Black, explaining that doubles as a craft took much more time and effort to hone.

“The first two years I was on the team, I actually didn’t play doubles,” said Claus. “It took me probably a whole season to get used to doubles. I hope as we play a little more and go into the next season, they’ll be a little more well adjusted.”

The singles matches were a slightly different story. Kazdan managed to pull off the only victory of the evening with scores of 6-3 and 7-5. Both Kazdan and Black called the match one of the best of his career.

While there were no other victories, none of the defeats were as drastic as in the doubles. One of the most notable matches was the neck-and-neck competition between Claus and Southern Indiana’s Juan Quiraz, with scores of 3-6, 6-2 and 10-7

“I thought we played pretty well, we just ran into an experienced stronger team,” said coach Black. “Now we’ve just got to take what we learned and put it into play throughout the season and keep improving a little bit at a time.”

“We’re always excited to travel and play teams further away,” said Kazdan. “We finished strong. We had a lot of comebacks, even though things didn’t go our way … We just ran into a much more experienced team. “

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