BRIDGET O’BRIEN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Senior
Jean-Noel Grinda will be one of the tennis team
members competing in the NCAAs in Athens, Ga., this weekend.
By Greg Schain
Daily Bruin Contributor
UCLA has had a lot of championship-caliber teams in men’s
tennis in the past eight years.
But in that stretch, the Bruins have never won a title.
Since Billy Martin took over the head coaching job in 1994, the
Bruins have made it a habit to get tantalizingly close to a
championship, then come up short of Stanford.
No other year epitomizes this trend better than 1996, when UCLA
was within a hair’s breadth of winning the NCAA
Championship.
That season, the Bruins had a stellar 24-0 record going into the
NCAA Tournament, earning the top seed. They easily made it to the
finals, where they met No. 2 Stanford, who they had already beaten
three times that season.
To start the match, the Bruins won the doubles point, meaning
all they had to do was win three of the six singles matches to win
the championship.
But they couldn’t do it. They choked.
At No. 5 singles, UCLA’s Matt Breen was playing
Stanford’s Grant Elliot. Breen had dominated Elliot all three
times they had played that year.
“I certainly thought we would win at No. 5
(singles),” Martin said. “Matt Breen had beaten
(Elliot) quite handily that year.”
The Bruins were swept at four straight singles spots before they
had a chance to win one, and ended up losing in disappointing
fashion, 4-1.
“You don’t know when some guys are going to react at
do-or-die time,” Martin said. “That’s
sports.”
The Bruins also had a great chance in 1999, when they went 22-2
and again earned the top seed in the tournament. UCLA breezed to
the finals that year also, as they did in 1996.
“I thought we had a really great chance to win in
1999,” senior Jean-Noel Grinda recalled. “We had a
really great team that season.”
The Bruins met No. 10 Georgia in the finals. After dropping the
doubles point, UCLA came out on fire in the singles, with five of
the six players winning the first set.
They quickly found themselves up 3-2 in the match, with two
singles spots still on the court in Marcin Rozpedski and Jong-Min
Lee.
Both of those players won the first set, dropped the second set
in a tiebreaker, then went on to lose the third set 6-2.
UCLA had once again choked in the end, losing 4-3.
“That was a tough one to lose,” Martin said.
“Sometimes the better team doesn’t win. It is not
because of their tennis talent (that they lose), but rather it is
mental.”
Last year, the Bruins were 23-4 going into the tournament,
seeded No. 2 in the tournament and had a great chance to win.
“I thought that us and Stanford were by far the two best
teams last year,” Martin said. “I felt that if we could
play Stanford in the finals, we could give them a heck of a
battle.”
But UCLA was unable to make it that far. Two days before the
NCAA Regionals, the Bruins’ No. 2 singles player, senior
captain Brandon Kramer, fractured his wrist and his season was
over.
That loss hurt the Bruins immeasurably, and they were never able
to realize their dream of making it to the finals. They fell in the
quarterfinals to No. 10 Tennessee, 4-1.
These are just a few of the horror stories that have come out of
the NCAA Championships for UCLA’s men’s tennis team in
the past eight years.
The truth is that they have never failed to reach the
quarterfinals and have made it to the semifinals in six of
Martin’s eight seasons.
Yet they have never won.
UCLA’S NCAA FINISHES UNDER HEAD COACH BILLY
MARTIN The Bruins have yet to win a team championship
under Martin. YEAR RECORD
CONFERENCE FINISH NCAA FINISH
1994 22-6 3rd T-3rd 1995 19-6 3rd T-3rd 1996 27-1 1st 2nd 1997 25-4
T-1st T-3rd 1998 17-8 T-2nd T-5th 1999 26-3 T-1st 2nd 2000 24-4 2nd
T-5th Original graphic by ADAM LEVITT Web adaptation by JENNIFER
JAVIER