BATON ROUGE — The 15th-ranked LSU men’s tennis team returns home after a two-match road trip on Wednesday to square off against its arch-rival Texas A&M at 4 p.m. at the W.T. “Dub” Robinson Tennis Stadium.
“We’re very excited to be back on our home courts,” said LSU head coach Jeff Brown. “We want to improve on our last outing and Texas A&M is definitely a quality opponent. It is a huge rivalry whenever we play them and we have some extra motivation to beat them, because they beat us twice last season.”
The Tigers head into Wednesday’s mid-week matchup against Texas A&M looking
to snap a three match losing streak. LSU owns a 3-3 overall record on the season with all of its wins coming at home and all of its losses coming on the road. In their three most-recent contests, the Tigers fell to No. 1-ranked Illinois, No. 18 Auburn and 22nd-ranked Alabama in hard-fought battles.
Texas A&M marches into Baton Rouge with an overall record of 8-2 on the season and a three match winning streak. The Aggies successfully rebounded from early season losses to both No. 16 Texas, 4-2, and Rice, 4-3, to reel off three-consecutive wins over Florida, Abilene Christian and Boise State.
LSU and the 24th-ranked Texas A&M Aggies will resume a heated rivalry on Wednesday that has featured 30 matches between the two schools. The series began in 1954 with a 12-1 Tiger victory, but Texas A&M currently holds a slight 17-13 advantage over LSU.
The Tigers look for revenge in this season’s contest as the Aggies defeated LSU twice last year including a victory in the opening round of the 117th-annual NCAA Championships. With the 4-1 win, No. 7 Texas A&M bounced the Tigers out of the 2002 NCAA Tournament and squelched their hopes for a national title.
Despite trailing Texas A&M in the all-time series record, the Tigers have won the previous two matches at home in the Robinson Tennis Stadium. LSU knocked off the Aggies, 5-2, in 2000 and defeated Texas A&M, 4-3, in 1998.
Texas A&M holds the advantage in number of ranked players over LSU, as the Aggies boast three players ranked in the top 100 versus the Tigers’ one.
According to the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s bi-weekly rankings, the Aggies’ Ryan Newport is currently the 36th-ranked player in the nation, Lester Cook is No. 63 and Jarin Skube is the 80th-ranked singles player.
Dan Kiernan, the Tigers’ senior co-captain, comes into Wednesday’s non-conference duel as the 95th-ranked player in the country. The native of Newcastle, England, has accumulated a 10-8 overall record this season and has notched a 3-2 dual mark.
The 15th-ranked LSU men’s tennis team will host the 24th-ranked Texas A&M Aggies on Wednesday in a midweek battle at the W.T. “Dub” Robinson Tennis Stadium beginning at 4 p.m.