Rice University
East Carolina
No. 22 Men's Tennis Docks East Carolina
4/18/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Tennis
April 18, 2008
DALLAS - The No. 22 Rice men's tennis team opened the Conference USA Championships with an impressive 5-0 quarterfinal victory over East Carolina Friday evening at the Turpin Tennis Center on the SMU campus.
The second-seeded Owls (15-7) move on to face No. 3 seed SMU, a 4-0 winner over Memphis, in the semifinals Saturday at 2pm. The Mustangs defeated Rice 5-0 during the regular season.
"We regrouped in singles after a shaky start in doubles," head coach Ron Smarr said. "Tomorrow will be a tough test for us against SMU in a tough environment. Hopefully, we'll have a better performance than we did against them in the regular season."
All three doubles matches were extremely close as Rice's No. 2 pair of Chong Wang and Tobias Scheil upended ECU's (13-12) Henrik Skalmerud and Aleksey Kochetov, 8-5.
Bruno Rosa and Dennis Polyakov clinched the 1-0 lead for the Owls by dismissing Stephen Whitwell and Bryan Oakley 8-6 on the No. 3 line. Rosa and Polyakov have won five consecutive decisions since teaming up in early March.
No. 24 ranked Ralph Knupfer and Christoph Müller had their match halted at 7-7 against Henrique Viana and Jaroslav Horvath.
No. 50 ranked Müller kicked off singles action with a dominating double bagel victory over Viana to push the advantage to 2-0.
No. 15 ranked Rosa notched a 6-4, 6-1 triumph over Horvath at the top of the lineup to make it 3-0 before Wang tallied a hard-fought 6-3, 6-4 decision at No. 4 against Kochetov to seal the victory
Knupfer ended a four-match singles losing streak by knocking off Whitwell 6-1, 6-4 in the No. 3 hole for the final margin of 5-0.
"I'm really happy for Ralph," Smarr said. "He's had to battle nagging injuries over the last month. This could be a big confidence builder for him.."
Both Filip Zivojinovic and Polyakov were one game away from clinching their match when play was stopped at the No. 5 and No. 6 spots, respectively.
Rice squares off against tournament host and No. 47 SMU in the semifinals Saturday at 2pm for the second straight season.
"We'll have to do a better job than today of setting the tone in doubles if we want to be successful tomorrow against SMU," Smarr said.
Players Mentioned
