(Photo: Patricia Vicente/WCSN)
After the Arizona State men’s tennis team opened its season with consecutive losses to Duke, Texas A&M and TCU, it seemed the team may be headed for a long season.
The Sun Devils looked overmatched against those teams, all of which were ranked in the Oracle/ITA Division I Men’s Collegiate Tennis top-25 rankings.
However, since then the Sun Devils have reeled off eight straight victories. These victories included wins against the University of San Diego, a team that had received votes in the Oracle/ITA Division 1 Men’s Collegiate Tennis top-25 rankings the week it faced ASU, and No. 33 Alabama. The victory against Alabama in Montgomery clinched the team an overall Blue Gray Classic tournament victory.
The Blue Gray Classic victory helped the Sun Devils jump up seven spots in the rankings from No. 20 to No. 13, an extremely high ranking for a team that is in its first season as a program since 2008.
“The guys are super young on the team, and we really didn’t think we’d be ranked this high so quickly,” freshman William Kirkman said. “To see numbers one and three next to our name is just a result that we’ve been working pretty hard and that we want it really bad.”
ASU head coach Matt Hill was certainly happy about the team’s high ranking, but said that the team still has much work to do as the season is far from over.
“I think it speaks a lot to the guys that we have on the team that are out there competing and how much they are growing as each match goes,” Hill said. “Obviously it’s exciting on one hand and then at the same time these rankings change every week and there’s a lot of tennis still to be played for us with NCAAs not coming until May.”
Sophomore Pierre Louis-Dodens said that the ranking illustrates how far the Sun Devils have already come in 2018.
“It shows us we improved a lot,” Dodens said. “We had a tough start at the beginning. We started a bit slow and played some tough teams.”
However, Dodens said that the high ranking is “always a positive” but the rankings later in the season will be more accurate.
The No. 13 ranking makes the Sun Devils the fourth highest-ranked team in the Pac-12 behind No. 2 Stanford, No. 4 UCLA and No. 11 USC.
The good tennis ASU has played as of late hasn’t only resulted in the No. 13 ranking for the team but also in individual results.
The Sun Devils have two players ranked in the Oracle/ITA Division 1 Men’s top-125 singles ranking. Freshman Benjamin Hannestad is ranked No. 56 in the country and senior Michael Geerts is ranked No. 65 in the nation.
The team has this weekend off before opening up Pac-12 play with a matchup against No. 2 Stanford in Tempe next Thursday at 5 p.m. MST.
