JackCentral

The Lumberjack men’s tennis team wrapped up their season this past weekend at the Big Sky Championships in Sacramento, Calif. The Jacks were defeated in the quarterfinals by Montana State, 4-0.
“The guys fought hard,” said assistant coach Gareth Ducray. “They had a lot of energy and were emotionally involved. We were all pretty proud.”
The Jacks dropped two of the three doubles matches of the contest. Sophomore Jacob Tracy and freshman David Flodberg picked up the doubles win over MSU’s Justin Hauck and David Kovas, 8-6. Sophomore Bradley Bristow and freshman Renzo Lau dropped their doubles match to Montana State’s Fletcher Keyes and Pawel Turzanski, 8-3. The last doubles match had Lumberjack seniors Jeffery Morys and Ryan Fraser falling to Bobcats Jakub Dybala and Kyle McDonald, 8-3.
Montana took the doubles point and headed into the single matches up 1-0.
In singles action the Bobcats struck first when Dybala defeated Bristow from NAU, 6-3, 6-2. Turzanski added another point for Montana State when he defeated Flodberg, 6-1, 6-4.
Up 3-0, Montana State needed one more point to clinch the victory. That point for the Bobcats came when Hauck defeated Fraser, 6-1, 6-4. That point sealed the deal and MSU clinched the 4-0 victory.
“They definitely had their chances,“ said interim head coach Kim Bruno.
Three singles matches were going on when the fourth point was awarded. In the Big Sky Championship, when the clinching point is earned all other matches are stopped. The topped matches included those for Lumberjacks Morys, Tracy, and Lau.
“I think we played well, we lost to these guys 6-1 in the regular season,” Bruno said.
With their season now over, the Lumberjacks finish 7-14 overall this season. The Lumberjacks also finish 4-4 in Big Sky Conference play. Montana State improved to 12-11 overall and 5-3 in BSC play.
“We have a pretty young team,” Ducray said. “This team has great chemistry and everybody really gets along.”
The Lumberjack season started in the wrong direction as the Jacks started 1-10. Those losses came against teams like Arizona, Arizona State, Denver and New Mexico.
“Our slow start was due to us playing pretty high caliber teams,” Ducray said. “Dean scheduled like that to prepare us for conference play.”
The Lumberjacks also had to deal with the leaving of former head coach Dean Owen in the later part of the season.
“It is definitely not a situation that you want, but these kids stepped up in conference when they had to,” Bruno said.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.