The men’s tennis team was unable to get a victory this weekend. The loss put the Frogs below the .500 mark with two weeks to prepare for their road match against the No. 21 LSU Tigers.The Horned Frogs (1-2), were defeated Sunday afternoon by the Texas A&M Corpus-Christi Islanders (1-2) at the Bayard H. Friedman Tennis Center.
“We had great chemistry in the doubles matches,” head coach Dave Borelli said. “Corpus Christi is a good team and much better than its ranking.”
Kriegler Brink and Cosmin Cotet knocked off the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s South Central Regional champs, Andrey Kumantsov and Mikhail Pavlov, 9-8(6), clinching a 2-1 victory for the Frogs in doubles play.
“That was a great match by Brink and Cotet,” Borelli said. “We needed that win going into singles play.”
Brink lost his match to Pavlov by default after the first set. Following set he retired from the match leaving an automatic match win for Pavlov.
Brink did not comment on his match and was not at the team meeting following the matches.
Both Borelli and tennis media relations representative Kyle Seay would not make any comment about Brink, except Seay said the default by Brink was not a cause for worry.
Freshman Caleb Bulls was defeated by the Islanders’ Dmitry Novikov (6-1), (6-3).
“In the first set, I was nervous and had no rhythm to my game,” Bulls said. “I started to hit the ball much better in the second set and was able to take something from the match.”
Bulls said his opponent did not make many mistakes, making it hard to stop Novikov’s momentum.
Junior Stuart Row and Christopher Biro, a transfer graduate student, both lost in straight sets to A&M-Corpus Christi’s Jose Zunino and Novikov.
The Frogs were down and needed Cotet and senior captain Andrew Ulrich to win their matches to secure a Frog victory.
Unfortunately, only Ulrich would come through for the Frogs.
Cotet went all the way to the third set against Corpus-Christi’s Raul Morant-Rivas.
“I got off to a slow start in the first set,” Cotet said. “I got encouragement from coach in the second and had momentum going into the third set.”
Cotet lost (6-0) in the first but came back and beat Rivas (6-0) in the second. In the third set, it was tied at four games a piece, and Rivas broke Cotet to go ahead five to four before serving to win the match.
“I was proud of Cotet’s play,” Borelli said. “He came back after the hard first set and did not quit on himself or his team.”
Ulrich took care of the Islanders’ Jaume Farras defeating him in straight sets, (6-1), (6-4).
“I was able to control point from the baseline,” Ulrich said. “I wanted to keep my opponent by running and kept him from being able to get good hard shots.