April 15, 2002

M. Tennis Goes 1-1

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On Saturday the men’s tennis team traveled to Providence, RI to take on the top ranked Brown Bears.

Unfortunately for the Red, it was a trip the netters wish they never had to make.

Brown gained an upper hand early in the afternoon after winning four straight singles matches, and never looked back en route to a 5-2 win.

It was truly a dogfight, or rather a bear-fight, with Cornell’s toughest team in recent memory gutting it out against, the Bears, the hottest team in the Ivy League. Brown is undefeated thus far Ivy singles play.

Sophomore Julian Cheng and senior Chris Lewis were

the only two Red players to win Saturday, both recording two-set singles victories, 7-6(6), 6-1 and 7-6(1), 6-1, respectively.

Sophomore Michael Schlappig did manage to take the first set of his match to a tiebreaker, in which he lost to Brown’s Nick Goldberg 7-4, before falling 6-2 in the second set.

The netters proceeded to lose all three doubles matches to finish the day. With the loss, Cornell falls to 14-5, 2-2 in the Ivy League.

“[Brown is] an awesome team that will be competing [for] the Ivy championship against Harvard,” explained senior captain Stefan Paulovic. “We played them hard and I am proud of everyone for giving it their best shot and hanging in there.”

The Red had a slightly better result in its match yesterday at Yale.

Despite being swept by the Bulldogs in all three doubles matches, Cornell managed to win all four singles matches to defeat Yale 4-3.

All but one of the singles matches went a full three sets.

Paulovic summed up the match: “It was unbelievably close, and could have gone either way.”

Victorious in singles play were sophomore Zach Gallin (playing number one position despite a pulled hamstring), Paulovic, Schlappig, and Lewis.

“It took a tremendous amount of strength and determination to play Yale as hard and well as we did coming off a tough loss to Brown the previous day,” said Paulovic.

With yesterday’s win over Yale, the Red improved to 3-2 in League play, the first time Cornell has been over .500 in several years.

Cornell will complete its spring season this weekend, when it visits Penn on Friday and Princeton next Sunday.

Archived article by Adam Zwecker