Tennis Falls in Regionals

After the men’s and women’s tennis teams sent some of best players on the road this weekend, they returned with mixed results. The women’s team traveled to Virginia to play on the courts at Old Dominion while the men stayed closer to home at Princeton. Both teams selected its top players to compete in the Wilson/ITA Northeast Regional Championships.
The men’s doubles pair of senior Rory Heggie and junior Joshua Goldstein had the best result, fighting from the 15th seed to reach the quarterfinals. Along the way, Heggie and Goldstein managed to defeat the No. 2 seeded team from Penn State, 8-3.
That last victory was the duo’s third of the weekend.
The team finally dropped out of the tournament in the quarterfinals, going to a tiebreaker against the No. 7 seed doubles from Colgate.
“Getting to the quarters is always good,” Heggie said. “We definitely choked away the match today. So that’s not much fun to go out that way.”
The five-man crew of seniors Heggie and Weston Nichols, juniors Kyle Doppelt and Joshua Goldstein, sophomore Jonathan Fife and freshman Jonathon Jaklitsch filled Cornell’s singles and doubles slots at Princeton.
Across all of the competitions, the Red’s netters managed to advance past the first day in three categories.
Also on the men’s side, Jaklitsch followed his first round bye in the singles main draw division with a 6-1, 6-2 two-set defeat of Temple’s Zach Tobias to secure a spot in the round of 32.
In the round of 32, the freshman was eliminated by Dartmouth sophomore Justin Tzou.
Fife entered the singles qualifying draw as the No. 6 seed. In his first match, Fife passed a Georgetown opponent with a third set score of 6-1. But Fife fell later in the day to Noah Gardener of Brown, 6-4, 6-4.
For the women’s competition, juniors Elizabeth Googe, Tamara John and Shayna Miller joined sophomore Susan Sullivan to form the team playing the nets at Old Dominion.
A first round bye kept Googe in the running at Old Dominion until Sunday when she lost to Magdalina Bresson of William and Mary in the singles bracket.
Cornell had a sprinkling of other match wins, including one victory for each of the women’s doubles duos and an early singles wins by Goldstein and freshman Jeremy Feldmen.
Despite the fast start, the Red did not advance anybody to the championship round.
Cornell typically faces some of its most difficult matches at the ITA Regional.
“It’s a little bit of a downer how it all settled off in the end,” Heggie said. “None of us did what we were really hoping to do or expecting to do. It was the toughest individual tournament we had all year … Hopefully we can build off this.”