Nick Pironio
When practice ended for N.C. State’s men’s tennis team Monday, players joked around, talked about the NCAA basketball tournament and sarcastically hassled each other before leaving the J.W. Isenhour center and in to the rainy afternoon.
The players had reason to enjoy themselves on a day that, by all other standards, would have been dreary.
But the Wolfpack are 16-3 this year, including road wins over SEC powers Kentucky and South Carolina is ranked No. 22 in the nation, its highest ranking in the coach Jon Choboy era, giving the team reason to feel pleased with themselves.
“[The ranking] reaffirms what these guys have done so far this year,” assistant coach Matt Halfpenny said. “It shows the rest of the country that we are a legitimate team. But I’m sure there are some teams out there that don’t buy it.”
State’s 16th win, a 7-0 shutout of Davidson on Sunday, eclipses last year’s win total before the Pack get into the meat of their ACC schedule.
After a 4-3 loss to No. 4 Duke and a 5-2 loss to No. 31 Wake Forest, the tennis players said they’re ready to get to the rest of the ACC.
“We definitely had the chance to take it late in the match,” junior William Noblitt said of the Duke match. “But we lost to them 7-0 my freshman year and 6-1 last year, so to have a chance at the end to beat them shows how much we’ve improved.”
The bright spot of the Pack’s season thus far was a 4-3 win at No. 19 Kentucky.
After losing the doubles point to begin the match, State took four of the six singles matches, including wins over ranked opponents by sophomore Nick Cavaday and junior Andre Iriarte, to grab the win.
“To lose that doubles point and then get a comeback win over a top-20 SEC team was pretty impressive, I thought,” Cavaday said. “Then we got a win over South Carolina, so our program has come far.”
Halfpennny noted a newfound confidence his team had in its SEC wins.
“The guys came out having a feeling that they could beat these teams, and they did,” Halfpenny said. “It showed with their attitude and their performance.”
The wins sandwiched a loss to Louisville, but Cavaday said the win over South Carolina shows how the team can bounce back from a loss, something they had trouble doing last year, losing eight in a row to end the season.
“To get that win over South Carolina was good for us and shows the difference from last year,” Cavaday said. “We have two talented and mature freshmen on the team and we’re a close-knit group, so we have that ability to bounce back.”
Those freshmen, Jay Weinacker and Chris Welte, are a combined 24-3 in singles matches on the year, with Weinacker leading the teams in wins with 16.
Welte has spent much of the year at the No. 6 seed, where he has gone 4-1 and won the deciding match against Kentucky.
“It was a pretty good experience, especially since it happened only three weeks into the season,” Welte said. “So I’ve been getting good experience.”
The Pack will travel to Virginia Tech and Virginia this weekend as they get into the heart of their ACC schedule and into the rest of the season.
“I’m sure there are some teams out there that don’t buy [the team’s success] and that still think we’re the N.C. State of four or five years ago,” Halfpenny said. “But that’s our mission, to go out and prove everyone wrong and to continue what we’ve been doing all season.”