One year ago, the men’s tennis team rolled to a 9-0 record before Louisville handed the Wolfpack its first loss of the season. This year, the No. 36 men’s tennis team (8-1) will look to avenge that loss to the Cardinals (6-6), using its loss 4-3 to Old Dominion on Wednesday as further inspiration. The rematch is Sunday in the J.W. Isenhour Tennis Center at 1 p.m.
According to coach Jon Choboy, the loss to ODU served as a sort of wake-up call to the Wolfpack, who had previously handled all of its opponents with ease up to that point.
“Whenever you lose, it doesn’t feel too good,” Choboy said. “But sometimes a loss isn’t the worst thing. It wakes you up a little bit and makes you realize that you’ve got some things to work on, [when] you start to think you’ve got it all figured out out there.”
The loss also taught the Pack that it needs to improve in a couple areas — a concept the team found difficult to grasp when winning its first eight matches.
“We can gain from it [the loss], and move on,” Choboy said. “We’ve got to pick some things up and learn from it. And I think the guys are aware there’s things we can do better, and we will hopefully do those things better. But if we’re going to be a good team we have to respond to the situation in the right way and move forward from here.”
At No. 52 in the nation, Louisville is the highest ranked team the Pack will have played thus far. And as the team found itself in several close, three-set matches against Old Dominion, Choboy said it will have many more for here on out.
Choboy compared the difficulty and competitive nature of future matches to the two-hour grudge match between junior Nick Cavaday and ODU’s No. 8 ranked Harel Srugo, where both players forced tiebreaks and Cavaday eventually prevailed 6-1, 3-6, 7-6 (6).
“From this point forward a lot of the matches are going to be like the one Nick Cavaday had yesterday, right down to the wire,” Choboy said. “It was one of the better college matches you’ll see — back and forth good quality tennis. And he had to really dig down deep to take it, and that’s the way it’s going to be for everybody. Everybody’s gotta step up to the plate. They’re all capable of doing it; they’ve just got to do it.”
The Cardinals feature one player ranked nationally in singles, No. 40 Slavko Radman. Radman and teammate Damar Johnson are ranked seventh nationally in doubles play.
Choboy said the team is familiar with Louisville from having lost to them last year.
“We’ll do a little bit more research tomorrow, but we know a fair amount about them,” Choboy said. “We have a pretty good idea from last year, though there’s a couple new guys. But we even played one of the guys in the fall, so we have a pretty good idea. They’re very good, so it’s going to be another very, very tough battle but I think we’ll come out and do a good job.”
