Rice University
LSU
Owls Season Ends in NCAA Opener
5/13/2016 12:00:00 AM | Men's Tennis
by Chuck Pool (cpool@rice.edu)
After nearly three hours of momentum swings and tireless effort on all courts, Boris Arias of LSU outlasted Rice's David Warren in three sets to give the 30th ranked Tigers a 4-3 win and bring a memorable campaign to a close for the 26th ranked Owls at the Bayard H. Friedman Tennis Center in Ft. Worth on Friday.
Rice finished the year 23-8 while the Tigers improved to 15-11 heading into a date with #4 TCU on Saturday.
In their third-ever meeting in the NCAA Championship, the two schools managed to upstage their earlier meeting in 2016, a 4-3 Rice win at the end of January, with a ferocious display of tennis that saw five of six singles matches extended to three sets and saw the two split four tiebreaker sets.
"Unbelievable college tennis match," Rice head coach Efe Ustundag said. "This is what we train for and dream of being a part of as coaches. (It's) the first round of the NCAA Championship and every single player left it all out on the court. Five singles matches went three sets. It just doesn't get any better than that," he added.
The day opened in promising fashion as the Owls reversed the outcome of the previous dual by taking the doubles point. After LSU opened with a win on court three, Adam Gustafsson and Jamie Malik picked up a 6-3 win on court two and Rice's 28th ranked tandem of Tommy Bennett and David Warren matched that score on court one to give the Owls a 1-0 lead.
The Owls burst out of the gate strongly in singles, winning three first sets by 6-1 scores, but any possibility of the match coming to a swift conclusion quickly evaporated as LSU responded on each court to take the second sets.
The Tigers took a 2-1 lead after picking up wins on courts two and three, but Bennett tied it up with a three-set win over LSU's 44th ranked Jordan Daigle 6-1, 2-6, 7-5. It was Bennett's second win over a ranked player this year, the other coming when he downed the Tigers' Justin Butsch in January to clinch the win for Rice.
Rice moved in front 3-2 when Jake Hansen rallied for a three-set win over LSU's Andrew Korinek who battled through the final points with an injury. LSU tied it with a three-set win on court six, just as Warren and Arias were heading to a tiebreaker.
The junior from Houston, who lead the Owls with 17 singles wins this spring, took a 4-1 lead in the tiebreak, but Arias rallied to win 8-6 and bring Rice's season to a close.
Ustundag praised his team after the match, but also noted that the success they had achieved this year will be the starting point for the squad which will lose only one senior in Gustafsson.
"I am really proud of being the coach of these guys," Ustundag said. "I felt they represented Rice really, really well out here today. I am really fired up about what this team has achieved this year. We met our goals for this year and we set some high standards going into next year and really brought some excitement back to Rice tennis."
Players Mentioned
