This post was updated Nov. 30 at 8:44 p.m.
Matches are rarely clean-cut when facing off against the nation’s best.
Decisive points and tiebreakers are often crucial deciders.
And last week was no exception.
Four members of UCLA men’s tennis competed at the NCAA Singles and Doubles Championships in Orlando, Florida, from Nov. 18 to 20. All Bruins had been eliminated from both singles and doubles contention by the conclusion of the third day of the five-day affair.
“I (wouldn’t) be honest if I didn’t say I was a little disappointed,” said coach Billy Martin. “Not in their effort or anything like that or their play – they played well. We lost a lot of close matches.”
The match opened with singles play, where No. 19 junior Spencer Johnson and sophomore Rudy Quan were both knocked out in their first matches of the 64-player draw.
Johnson fell 6-2, 6-7(4), 7-6(1) to No. 15 Martin Borisiouk of NC State. Two sets went to tiebreaks, turning the contest into a point-for-point battle. The 2025 singles ITA All-American couldn’t capture the victory, but the loss came against a strong opponent – Borisiouk advanced to the quarterfinals before falling in straight sets. Johnson mounted a quarterfinal run in last year’s tournament.
Quan dropped his match to No. 103 William Jansen of Georgia, 6-7(5), 4-6, 6-2. The Thousand Oaks, California, local ended his fall season with his first loss, finishing with a 5-1 singles record. Jansen reached the round of 16 before being knocked out.
“(I felt strong) mentally mostly,” Quan said following the early exit. “I had a clear mind about what I wanted to do out there, even though it might not have gone my way.”
But the tournament wasn’t over for either athlete, with doubles play still ahead on day two.
Johnson teamed up with redshirt junior Emon van Loben Sels, and the pair claimed a 6-3, 3-6, 1-0(8) round-of-32 victory against No. 90 duo Niels Ratiu and Chris Xu from North Carolina on Nov. 19. After the teams split sets and the first-to-10 tiebreak reached an 8-8 stalemate, Johnson and van Loben Sels surged ahead with a pair of points to clinch the win.
But their doubles success didn’t carry over to the next round.
The duo fell to Michigan’s No. 49 pairing of Max Dahlin and Bjorn Swenson, 7-5, 4-6, 1-0(7). The match went to a tiebreaker round, but the edge went the other way, with Dahlin and Swenson taking the decisive frame 10-7. Johnson and van Loben Sels closed the fall with a 7-2 record.
“(I was) playing really aggressive and finding ways to close the net,” van Loben Sels said. “It came down to a few points at the end, but I still think the level we played was pretty high. I think there are still a lot of positives we can all take as a team from the fall and be ready to go in January.”
The other Bruin duo of Quan and senior Aadarsh Tripathi faced the No. 1 duo in the country – Petar Jovanovic and Benito Sanchez Martinez of Mississippi State – in the round of 32, where they fell 6-4, 6-4 in straight sets.
“We were right there,” Quan said. “We could have totally won that match. I genuinely believe that we should have won that match. A couple things were unlucky, and they (Jovanovic/Martinez) played really well too.”
The Mississippi State pair fell to the Virginia tandem of No. 18 Mans Dahlberg and Dylan Dietrich, who ultimately won the doubles championship.
With the fall season officially in the books, the team will wait for the dual-match season, which begins Jan. 17 against UC Irvine.
“It just wasn’t the ending we would have liked,” Martin said. “We’re all hoping to use that for fuel to fire us even more so for the team season that will start in January.”
Comments are closed.