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Opening tournament doesn’t prove much for men’s tennis

It's not that the men's tennis team didn't want to see wins during last weekend's Rice Fall Invitational. They're competitors. They wanted to win.

But maybe not that badly.

Having only had three official practices, Assistant Coach Efe Ustundag said the results of last week's tournament, the first of the season, was used primarily to assess where the team's skills lay, how the new players stacked up, and how the holes left by Tobias Scheil and Christoph Muller, both of whom exhausted their eligibility last spring -- and both of whom proved to be the team's most capable duo on the doubles court -- will be filled.

Ustundag wasn't terribly disappointed with the team's showing, but, as he is wont to do, the coach prodded his players to give more against the lesser competition.

"The quality of tennis wasn’t necessarily how it was going to be at the regionals, or how it was going to be in the spring. We saw some brilliance in flashes – a great set here, a great set there, and sometimes a really awful set followed by an improved set," Ustundag said. "But I can’t necessarily say, 'This guy really kicked butt throughout his entire match and he really played solid.’ There were some letdown. … It was a little bit of a stop-and-go situation."

The need for consistency is something I'd gather plagues all college tennis teams, but it is a constant theme on the squad, and has been for years. I guess there is some comfort to take from the fact that it appears to still exist.

The newcomers -- Oscar Podlewski, a junior transfer from Elon; Michael Nuesslein; a sophomore transfer from the University of South Florida; and Jonathan Chang, the team's lone new freshman, from Houston's Memorial High -- were all present for the tournament, and while they're play was, like others, rusty, Ustundag thought Chang was the biggest surprise of the weekend, beating Rice senior Dennis Polyakov on the second day of competition.

As it stacks up, the team will be as balanced as it's ever been, with six underclassmen and four upperclassmen. There's no telling where the greatest talent will lie -- obviously, Bruno Rosa will still carry the brunt of expectations, but Sam Garforth-Bles and Isamu Tachibana could be making some noise -- just as there's no telling when the doubles lineups will be finalized.

Fortuantely, the Owls will get another shot at slotting their team at this weekend's Midland Invitational, which will feature the familiar SMU faces, as well as representatives from Oklahom and Texas A&M, among others. Only a handful of Owls will attend (including Rosa and Podlewski), so the talent, it seems, will be stacked.

Of course, it will be difficult to focus on the competition when the team is crashed in the houses of the tournament's hosts. Let's hope those skillet-and-grits breakfasts, coming after a night in a posh guest room, don't distract them.

*Update: Rice took the C (freshman Chang, over transfer Podlewski) and D (Rajam) singles flights, as well as A (Tachibana/Podlewski) and B (Nusslein/Saravia) in doubles. Meanwhile, Tachibana grabbed third and Nusslein took fifth in the A flight, and Podlewski trounced Garforth-Bles for third in B flight.

For some reason, final results were not put up on RiceOwls.com. Still looking for another contributor in the SID, I suppose.