Crimson Tide Sweeps M. Tennis

The Harvard men’s tennis team’s high from Saturday’s exhilarating win over No. 17 Virginia Commonwealth was too good to last another day. Yesterday, a Crimson Tide came crashing down and brought the Crimson back to Earth.

Fifteenth-seeded and 16th-ranked Alabama (19-9) crushed No. 40 Harvard (18-9) yesterday at the Beren Tennis Center, 4-0. Alabama came in well-rested, having cruised past Marist on Saturday, while Harvard had little left after its match against VCU came down to the wire.

“It would be easy to say we were empty on adrenaline,” said Harvard coach David Fish ’72. “From the first point it looked like we didn’t have anything left.”

Four of Harvard’s six singles matches against VCU went to three sets. Alabama’s longest completed match against Marist was decided by a 6-2, 6-0 score.

“We had a lot of long matches yesterday,” said Harvard captain and No. 6 singles player Oli Choo, who closed out his career this weekend. “I know I was pretty sore. They were pretty fresh.”

Fish said Alabama attacked well and never let the Crimson get comfortable. He credited the Crimson Tide coaching staff for its strategy.

“They were a lot more aggressive than [VCU] yesterday,” Choo said. “ I think we had trouble adjusting.”

The bright spots at singles for Harvard were junior co-captain David Lingman and classmate Mark Riddell winning their first sets before their matches were suspended.

The defeat made it three years in a row that Harvard had hosted the NCAA first and second rounds but failed to advance to the Sweet 16. Yet the win over VCU made it Harvard’s most impressive showing.

“I’m delighted with my guys,” Fish said. “I know they feel awful but I told them before we started the tournament there would be 63 teams who feel awful after they lost.”

Choo considered the year, which included an undefeated Ivy season and ECAC title, an overall success. Harvard’s finish and NCAA performance seemed improbable in late March, when the team went 3-8 to start the spring.

Fish believed the Ivy League’s newly instituted seven-week rule, which prevented the team from practicing together during much of the winter, was a factor in the slow start.

“I don’t think we came into this season as well-conditioned as we might have been had we been able to work during the dead-period, so in those 4-3 matches, we just didn’t have quite enough gas,” Fish said. “Guys were still sort of getting their feet wet.”

But he praised the team for bouncing back. The NCAA victory is all the more impressive considering that VCU won the Blue-Gray Classic in March. Harvard lost in the first round of the same tournament to Middle Tennessee State.

“We went through a lot of disappointment early in the season where we just couldn’t get that extra point,” Fish said. “A lot of teams would just sort of lie down and say this isn’t our year. This team kept saying, ‘No, we’re going to learn from this.’”

There’s still plenty of learning to be done, given that Choo is the team’s only senior. Next year’s senior class will includes five athletes who played consistent starting roles on this year’s squad.

“We have some really great young people who can do it with more experience and step in,” Fish said. “We’ve got a lot of guys with real character and lot of them are determined to see what they can do. But we’ll definitely miss Oli, because we love him.”

—Staff writer David R. De Remer can be reached at remer@fas.harvard.edu.