Sunday, February 3
Baton Rouge, LA
Noon
Rice University
1
at
6
LSU
LSU Hands Owls 6-1 Loss
2/3/2019 2:18:00 PM | Men's Tennis
The Lead: The Rice men's tennis team dropped a 6-1 decision to LSU at the LSU Tennis Complex on Sunday afternoon. The loss was the Owls first of the year, while LSU improved to 6-1 on the season.
Doubles: Rice's Sumit Sarkar and Eric Rutledge improved to 2-0 with a 6-3 win on court one, but the Owls dropped the doubles point for the first time this season as LSU took wins on courts two and three. The win at the third line was the first for the Owls in five matches.
Singles: LSU carried the momentum over from doubles to singles, grabbing five of six first sets and continuing on to capture each court. Sumit Sarkar put Rice on the board with a 6-1, 6-2 win over Shane Monroe on court one to improve to 4-0 on the season.
Efe Ustundag: First off, I have to congratulate LSU. They played a very clean match other than our match at No. 1 doubles and singles. The rest of the matches were not competitive enough from us. I felt like we played a team without any real holes in their games, and what holes that might have been there, they did a really good job of masking them and giving us any real opportunities to exploit them. It's like I said in the preview for this match, we had to be better today and we weren't. This was one-sided and a lot of that had to do with LSU playing a very clean match. Any time you lose like this, it takes a couple days to let it go but we have to. It's another short week where we have a Friday-Sunday set up at home with a pesky Texas A&M Corpus team that always plays us tough and then on Sunday Elon who is coming off some big matches against ACC opponents. It will be back to work on Tuesday and start working to correct some of the things from this one.
Next Up: Rice will be back home for a pair of matches next weekend. They will host Texas A&M Corpus Christi on Friday and then join with the Rice women in another combined match on Sunday. The men will host Elon while the women will take on Kansas State.
Doubles: Rice's Sumit Sarkar and Eric Rutledge improved to 2-0 with a 6-3 win on court one, but the Owls dropped the doubles point for the first time this season as LSU took wins on courts two and three. The win at the third line was the first for the Owls in five matches.
Singles: LSU carried the momentum over from doubles to singles, grabbing five of six first sets and continuing on to capture each court. Sumit Sarkar put Rice on the board with a 6-1, 6-2 win over Shane Monroe on court one to improve to 4-0 on the season.
Efe Ustundag: First off, I have to congratulate LSU. They played a very clean match other than our match at No. 1 doubles and singles. The rest of the matches were not competitive enough from us. I felt like we played a team without any real holes in their games, and what holes that might have been there, they did a really good job of masking them and giving us any real opportunities to exploit them. It's like I said in the preview for this match, we had to be better today and we weren't. This was one-sided and a lot of that had to do with LSU playing a very clean match. Any time you lose like this, it takes a couple days to let it go but we have to. It's another short week where we have a Friday-Sunday set up at home with a pesky Texas A&M Corpus team that always plays us tough and then on Sunday Elon who is coming off some big matches against ACC opponents. It will be back to work on Tuesday and start working to correct some of the things from this one.
Next Up: Rice will be back home for a pair of matches next weekend. They will host Texas A&M Corpus Christi on Friday and then join with the Rice women in another combined match on Sunday. The men will host Elon while the women will take on Kansas State.
Team Stats
#1 Doubles Match
#2 Doubles Match
#3 Doubles Match
Order of Finish:
3,1,2
#1 Singles Match
12
66
Shane Monroe / 0 [LSU]
12
#2 Singles Match
12
44
Rafael Wagner / 0 [LSU]
66
#3 Singles Match
12
24
Malik Bhatnagar / 0 [LSU]
66
#4 Singles Match
12
31
Boris Kozlov / 0 [LSU]
66
#5 Singles Match
12
15
Joey Thomas / 0 [LSU]
67
#6 Singles Match
12
22
Nick Watson / 0 [LSU]
66
Order of Finish:
6,1,4,5,3,2
Players Mentioned
/ Men's Tennis
/ Men's Tennis
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