The Marquette men’s tennis team swept both dual meets Saturday at the Helfaer Tennis Stadium to bring its record to a perfect 3-0.
“Overall I was satisfied with the way they competed.,” coach Steve Rodecap said. “I felt they were pretty hungry. The desire was there and I felt that our focus and energy was good.”
The Golden Eagles have yet to drop a match in both singles and doubles taking down Chicago State 4-0 and following that up with a 9-0 drubbing of IUPUI.
The Chicago State Cougars team came in short handed due to injury and player ineligibility and only had three players to compete with.
“Unfortunately we didn’t get as many matches in as we had hoped,” Rodecap said. “The team [Chicago State] was beat up and had to default a couple spots to us.”
In the matches that were played, Marquette had no difficulties taking the lone singles match and all three singles matches.
Later in the day, Marquette continued its hot play against the IUPUI Jaguars sweeping all nine matches.
Senior Dusan Medan led the way for the Golden Eagles at first singles recording a tough 6-2, 6-4 victory. Up 5-2 and serving for the match, Medan was broken after a long game. Medan dropped another game before bouncing back and closing the match on his serve.
Fellow seniors Mark Rutherford and and Niko Boulieris also won at third and fifth singles, respectively.
“I thought we came out really strong today,” Boulieris said. “I was excited to see a lot of the new guys step up and play really well.”
It is still early in the season and there are lessons yet to be learned.
“We had a few guys that got off to a bit of a shaky start from a confidence standpoint,” Rutherford said. “Overall, people pulled it together in the end.”
Rodecap agrees with his senior leader. “It’s still early, we were a little flat in a couple sets today. It’s early and we have to do a good job of getting through that.”
It will only get tougher tomorrow as Marquette welcomes Illinois-Chicago to Milwaukee.
“It’s going to get tougher and tougher,” Rodecap said. “Tomorrow we will have a tough test against Illinois-Chicago. They have a lot of experience on their team and we will have to be ready to match that.”
