Men's tennis falls short two times
"The competition was very tough; some of the best players in the country were there," Head Coach Larry Turville said.
Assistant men's coach Greg Davis believed that the Rice men played less aggressively than they should have.
"Our problem was that when we had the other guys down, we expected them to give us the match; we let them fight back and take control of the play," he said.
At the Rolex/USL Tennis Classic, the Flight B doubles team of juniors Ben Pritchett and Naisohn Arfai had the best showing for the team.
After skating through their first-round match (8-2) against a team from the University of Alabama, Pritchett and Arfai found themselves struggling to a 9-7 win over Oscar Subriats and Bernd Hesse of USL.
In the semifinal match against the team of Blake Rue and Eric Allen from the University of Texas at Austin, Pritchett and Arfai fought back from being down 4-1.
While serving for a tie-breaker at 7-8, they lost the game and the match 7-9.
In the A Flight, the team of Rico Jacober and Robert Collins was unable to muster up much more than a quarterfinal loss to another UT team.
Turville attributes this lackluster performance to the stomach virus Jacober was suffering from during the tournament.
"He (Jacober) wasn't even playing at 25 percent of his ability," Turville said.
Collins noticed a substantial fluctuation in Jacober's game.
Collins said, "He was coughing constantly, and this really distracted both of us."
Top-ranked Texas A&M University and Texas Christian University dominated both singles and doubles.
However Rice's Shaheen Ladhani was able to break up the big-name, big-school homogeneity by taking fifth in the singles winner's bracket.
After a tiring three-set match against Simon Crabtree of the University of Oklahoma, Ladhani went out and defeated Eric Elek of A&M in straight sets.
He then fell in straight sets to Texas Tech Unversity's Mattis Rohlin, the second-seeded player in the tournament.
"Overall, I don't think that our performance at these two tournaments was all that shabby," Davis said.
"I mean, last year at this time we weren't even in the position to compete at this level, and this year we were actually able to give these nationally-ranked players something to reckon with."
The men will travel this weekend to Austin to participate in the ITA All-American Tournament.
This item appeared in the Sports section of the October 13, 1995 issue.
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