Tuesday, March 12
Austin, TX
5:30 PM
Rice University
2
at
5
#4 Texas
Photo by: Maria Lysaker - Rice University
Sarkar Sparkles in Loss to Longhorns
3/12/2019 8:44:00 PM | Men's Tennis
Defeats the No. 4 singles player in straight sets
The Lead: Sumit Sarkar upset fourth-ranked Christian Sigsgaard and Campbell Salmon picked up his sixth win of the year, but No. 4 Texas stormed past Rice 5-2 at the Texas Tennis Center on Tuesday night.
Doubles: The Longhorns (14-1) raced to the early lead by grabbing the doubles point with wins at the first and third lines. Daniel Warren and Jacob Eskeland were tied 4-4 in their match at the second position when Texas clinched the point.
Singles: Texas clinched the match with straight set wins on courts two through five, but Sarkar and Salmon answered for Rice with rugged victories. Sarkar posted the Owls first singles win over a top ten opponent in dual action since Robert Searle downed seventh-ranked Travis Helgeson of Texas in 2006. He took the opening set 6-4, fighting back from being down two breaks and 3-0, then survived a 4-1 start by Sigsgaard in the second to force a tiebreaker. Leading 6-3, he ended the match with a second-serve ace to improve to 10-4 in duals this year and post his second consecutive win over a ranked opponent. The 10 wins also match his total from last season when he finished his freshman year 10-11. Campbell won a first-set tiebreaker over the Longhorns Rodrigo Banzer and then rebounded to win the final three games of the second set to provide the Owls second point of the night.
Efe Ustundag: "We were a little disappointed as to how the doubles got started. We went down 3-0 on two of the courts right away, similar to how we started against SMU. It's obviously a lot different when you are playing a top five team as opposed to an unranked one. I was hoping to have a little better start. When you face a team of this caliber, you want to exchange shots early and let them know you are there to fight for every point. Our singles was strong. We obviously took two of them and we had Eric (Rutledge) serving to take his second set and Mohamed (Abdel-Aziz) played two really tight sets. When you play a team like Texas, there are no holes. After the way the doubles went, we really did play much stronger singles and it felt as though we were fighting on every court. There are no moral victories but we showed great fight. If we get a better start in doubles, it makes you wonder what could have been. Jacob (Eskeland) and Adam (Oscislawski) ran into some really solid opposition and got beat, there is no shame in that. But when you couple that with the doubles, you are suddenly down 3-0 with no room for error. It wasn't so much the quality of the tennis Sumit played tonight, it was the desire, the tenacity. His conversion rate on the key deuce points was what decided the match. He got himself out of some deuce points and won some. He closed it out with a very solid 7-3 tiebreak, and that has been one of the things that's hampered him at times this year. Rodrigo Banzer is a very solid player and Campbell stayed with the game plan even when things were getting away from him. He let a 5-4, 30-0 lead get away from him and lost eight straight points to go down 6-5. But he had a really solid service game to force the tiebreak and then played a tiebreaker that was very similar to Sumit. I'm very happy for him. It was one of his better matches. He's a different player than the one who won against Auburn three weeks ago.
Up Next: The Owls will be idle for the remainder of Spring Break and return home on the weekend of March 22-24 to host Dartmouth, Texas Tech and Utah State in the 61st annual Rice Invitational. "We will train for the next couple days and then I am going to give them some time off," Ustundag said. "We've got a really heavy load of tennis coming up in the next several weeks, but the good thing is our travel is basically done for the rest of the regular season. Our only road match left is a Lamar and our next real road trip is when we head to Middle Tennessee for the C-USA Championships (April 19-21)".
Team Stats
#1 Doubles Match
#2 Doubles Match
#3 Doubles Match
Order of Finish:
3,1
#1 Singles Match
12
67
Christian Sigsgaard / 0 (4/-) [UT]
46
#2 Singles Match
12
22
Yuya Ito / 0 (9/-) [UT]
66
#3 Singles Match
12
15
Harrison Scott / 0 (49/-) [UT]
67
#4 Singles Match
12
32
Colin Markes / 0 [UT]
66
#5 Singles Match
12
54
Chih Chi Huang / 0 [UT]
76
#6 Singles Match
12
77
Rodrigo Banzer / 0 [UT]
65
Order of Finish:
4,2,3,5,1,6
Players Mentioned
/ Men's Tennis
/ Men's Tennis
/ Men's Tennis
/ Men's Tennis
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