BATON ROUGE — The 23rd-ranked LSU men’s tennis team fell prey to an undefeated Alabama Crimson Tide team on Friday as the Tigers lost their Southeastern Conference opener, 6-1, at the W.T. “Dub” Robinson Tennis Stadium.
With the win, Alabama improved to a perfect 11-0 record on the season and moved to a 1-0 mark in conference play. The Tigers dropped their
fourth-consecutive SEC opener and fell to 6-2 on the season. LSU’s losses have both been against top-ranked teams in No. 11 Alabama and No. 19 Texas A&M.
“I have to give them (Alabama) a lot of credit,” said LSU head coach Jeff Brown. “They came in and took it to us on our home court and that is a difficult thing to do in the SEC. To be 11-0 at this point in the season, they are obviously doing a lot of things right and they found a way to get the doubles point which was huge.”
The ever-crucial doubles point came down to a back-and-forth contest between LSU’s combination of Peter Richman and Brandon Nicholson and Alabama’s 60th-ranked tandem of Chris Gostek and William Boyles on court No. 3.
Alabama’s doubles squad jumped out to quick 5-3 lead in the match before Richman/Nicholson fought back to tie the vital contest at 7-7. In the following game, the Tigers came extremely close to breaking Alabama’s serve and taking an 8-7 lead before the Crimson Tide rallied and won the match 9-7. With the victory, Alabama jumped out to an early 1-0 advantage.
“Our team does a good job of following our opponent’s results and we noticed that Alabama had lost the doubles point a few times and we have very good doubles teams, so to lose that point was a huge downer for us,” Brown said.
In singles play, Alabama picked up a trio of prompt wins on courts No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 to close out its 11th-consecutive victory of the season.
“We gave up a couple of straight-set singles matches which really put a lot of pressure on our other guys,” said Brown. “We knew that we had to play perfect in those other matches and we lost a lot of close contests on some courts. We have to be more competitive. We can’t get beat that quickly in our singles matches.”
LSU’s Cory Ross registered the Tigers’ lone victory on Friday, as the junior from Littleton, Colo., defeated Michale Ray Pallares, 6-7(2), 6-2, 1-0(7), on court No. 6. With the win, Ross extended his winning streak to nine matches and upped his overall record to 14-5.
The 23rd-ranked LSU men’s tennis team will next be in action on Sunday as the Tigers host Auburn in another SEC Western Division showdown at 1 p.m. at the W.T. “Dub” Robinson Tennis Stadium.
Admission is free to all LSU home tennis matches and refreshments will be provided by the Tennis Tiger Athletic Foundation.