M. Tennis Defeats Penn State for Title

New team, same results.

Despite fielding a lineup almost entirely different from that of last spring’s NCAA Tournament run, the Harvard men’s tennis team captured the ECAC Division I Men’s Tennis Championships yesterday—the Crimson’s third in a row—with a 4-1 victory over Penn State, the same opponent Harvard felled to win its 2003 crown.

But unlike last year’s 4-0 romp over the Nittany Lions, yesterday’s match proved somewhat tighter.

“Penn State came out of the blocks really hard and was, honestly, a bit stronger than we’d seen them last year,” said Harvard coach Dave Fish ’72. “It was a little surprising.

“Actually,” Fish corrected himself, “I don’t know if surprising was a good word. I guess that I thought that with [our earlier wins over] Penn and Princeton, we might well have seen the two other strongest teams in the tournament. After playing Penn State, though, I saw why they got into the finals.”

Harvard took the doubles point, but the Nittany Lions didn’t give in. Sophomores Gideon Valkin and Shantanu Dhaka took their match 8-6, while freshman Ashwin Kumar and senior Martin Wetzel won 8-5. But the final match—that of captain Jonathan Chu and junior Brandon Chiu—was suspended with Harvard trailing 7-8.

“We expect everyone to play well against us, because we’re Harvard,” Chu said with a laugh, “We beat them pretty handily last year, 4-0, but I wasn’t surprised because they had the potential to play well.

The singles competition proved equally challenging. Valkin secured a tight 7-6 (3), 7-5 win by forcing a final break, and Wetzel pulled out a three-setter—6-3, 3-6, 6-2—in the second singles slot.

And though the Crimson victory led his match to be suspended, Dhaka managed to fight back long enough to keep the pressure on the Nittany Lions. Down 5-4 in the second set, the sophomore broke back, won a tiebreak 8-6, and was midway through a tense third set before Harvard secured the win.

“They weren’t getting some easy wins,” Fish said of Penn State. “If they’d rolled those easy wins, suddenly, it’s 3-3.”

Chu took his match in straight sets, and Kumar’s was suspended in the third. Fish indicated, though, that the freshman—who counts the ECACs as his first collegiate tournament—fought back and played quite strongly.

Kumar’s progress is indicative of a larger team theme, though. Of the six singles players Harvard used, only Chu was a regular starter last year—though Wetzel would have been if not for a nagging groin injury that sidelined him for months.

For Valkin, Beren, Dhaka and Kumar, these fall matches will give the Crimson a sense of what to expect for the spring dual-match season, and despite the loss of last year’s five seniors, there seems to be no dearth of talent on this squad.

“We had 11 guys last year who were able to fill six [singles] spots,” Chu said, echoing what had been said about the depth on last year’s squad, “so it was no surprise that some of the guys [who didn’t get to play then] were ready to step into the spots of the five [graduated] seniors this year.”

And though there’s no telling what the fall season will continue to bring, this newest ECAC crown brings with it some confidence, at least.

“They didn’t take the roll of rebuilders,” Fish said. “They said, ‘we have a chance to win this, and we’re going to go for it.’”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.