The men's tennis team entered Saturday's match looking to open up the spring portion of its season on a high note with a win over an unranked opponent. No. 21 Tufts, however, came up short against Colby 5-4 on the indoor courts in the Gantcher Center, dropping the Jumbos to a 2-1 record while Colby advanced to 2-0 on the season.
While singles continued to display its dominance as the anchor of the Tufts team, a Colby sweep of the doubles portion to kick off the contest put the Jumbos in a 0-3 hole. Despite generally solid play from top to bottom on the singles ladder, it wasn't enough to net Tufts the win after the squad picked up only four while surrendering two, giving Colby the five matches it needed to seal the victory.
Additional problems for the Jumbos included sophomore Jon Trott falling ill with the flu hours before match time Saturday afternoon, requiring a shuffle of both the singles and doubles lineups. That said, it was the failure to pick up any of the three doubles matches that remained foremost on the disappointed minds of the Jumbos after the match.
"Whenever you lose all three doubles in any match, it puts you in such a big hole, and compounding that, our No. 5 singles player Jon Trott had the flu, so [junior] Vinh [Tran] didn't even know until half an hour before the match that he was playing in it," senior captain Will Fleder said. "We can't ever lose three doubles again; it's just not a hole we want to put ourselves into. There's extremely little margin for error [after that], even more so when we don't have our team totally healthy."
Fleder teamed up with sophomore Daniel Landers at No. 1, falling 8-5 to Colby senior captain Zach Schuman and junior Nick Rosen-Wachs. Freshmen Jake Fountain and Tony Carucci lost by the same margin at the second spot, while the duo of sophomore Bryan Wilner and Tom Wilmanski were downed by a score of 8-6.
"I was definitely disappointed," Fountain said. "I think that we are a better team and just didn't come out and show everyone that we are. I was disappointed a little bit in my doubles performance as well; I should have done a lot of things better, and if we had won mine or any of the doubles matches, we would have won the overall match."
The Jumbos punched back after taking the court for singles as Fleder, Fountain, sophomore Andrew Rosen and Wilner all cruised to straight-set victories in the first, third, fourth and fifth singles slots, respectively. Colby countered with a win of its own as Schuman beat Carucci 6-4, 6-4 to even the overall match score at four apiece, putting the pressure of the whole match on No. 6 singles.
Tran fought hard coming into the lineup to address Trott's absence, but Colby freshman Michael Johnsen outlasted him 7-6 (6), 4-6, 6-1 in three sets at No. 6 to end the contest in the Mules' favor.
"Vinh just didn't win the big points," Fleder said. "Against good players, you need to take advantage of the few opportunities you're given. Vinh had two break points in the first game of the third set, and he had a break point in the third game of the third set after he held; either one of those breaks would have continued his momentum big time."
"I got to give a lot of credit to both Vinh and his opponent, they both played really well," Fountain added. "Vinh struck the ball really well and had to keep moving a lot, and made the other guy work for the match, so I was really proud of Vinh for that. I agree that on some of the bigger points he might have gotten a little tight, or the opponent came up with a good shot, but I think that it was just a great battle for sure. Even though the last set was 6-1, the games went to deuce a lot. Both teams had their chances, I guess Michael from the other team just capitalized on more of them."
Although surrendering such a close match to an arguably weaker team proved tough for the squad, the loss illuminated the continued importance of doubles and will lead to a renewed focus on those three key matches.
"The doubles is going to make the team or break the team," Fountain said. "If we get our doubles to a level where we can win two out of the three in every contest, then I think we have a really good chance at beating a lot of these teams because of our depth in singles."
With that in mind, the Jumbos look ahead to a pair of weekend matches, first on the road against Brandeis Friday, followed by a Saturday home date with MIT, all before the squad heads to Florida for a week of training during Spring Break. The Jumbos have traditionally proven themselves the victors of their annual date with the Judges, including a 5-2 win last season.
"We've realized that this loss to Colby gives us very little margin for error now," Fleder said. "We've had our loss of the year where we were the more talented team. Brandeis is also a very talented team, so if we don't play our best, it could be a tough match. So we're going in more focused and more driven than we were before the Colby loss because it's tough for your backs to be up against the wall after your first match of the spring season and our third match overall, but our backs up against the wall right now and we have to play that way and dig deep."
