The 10 Best Blog Moments of the Past 5 Years

As I’m sure some of you have figured out by now, I am d3tennisguy. When the original Guru decided to take a step back from the blog in 2012, it left a chasm in the D3 tennis blog universe that many were were trying (foul language) to fill. As a player, I very much appreciated the blog and knew that the D3 tennis community would be losing something if it fell by the wayside. I also had a bunch of time on my hands, so I decided to throw my hat into the ring. I plowed through season previews for every top 30 team over the course of a month and a half with the Guru following along to see if I had the stuff and the syntax to follow in his footsteps. Once I got his endorsement, the daily view-counter on my wingding of a blog jumped from 10 to 500. A couple weeks later, we combined our creative talents and our ample free time to create the site you see today. The next year, we were able to recruit writers for the Central and Atlantic South, so I didn’t have to pretend to know about teams away from the West region anymore. The next year, we swapped out that ratty old Central region writer for a grumpy and even older Central region writer and picked up a writer for the NESCAC (I mean, Northeast region). The next year, we picked up a writer for all the teams just outside the top 30. The next year, we added writers for the women’s side, and we’re still working on improving that side of the blog. Now we’re averaging about 3,500 daily views with nine writers (but still with a barely functioning website).

Once again, I’m sure some of you may have noticed that my posts this year have taken a somewhat sentimental tone. That is because after this season, everyone that I either played or coached against will have graduated. I’ll probably keep writing because this stupid blog is like heroin to me, but the end of this year represents a paradigm shift for me. With that in mind, I’ve been reflecting on my favorite moments from the blog’s last 5 years. These are the moments that aren’t necessarily relevant for their tennis greatness, but moments that were either enhanced or unfortunately magnified due to the existence of the blog. I realize that this post is incredibly self-indulgent, the kind of thing a 17 year old backpacking to find himself on the Pacific Crest Trail might do, but I’m doing it anyways.

Here they are, completely objectively and in no particular order, my favorite blog moments of the past 5 years:

March 8, 2012

CMS fans, I apologize. People never forget. In my mind, this is still the greatest upset in the history of D3 tennis, perhaps in the history of life on earth. CMS was absolutely loaded with talent and looking for Settles’ first national championship. They had Robby Erani, one of the best players in the country the previous year, at 4 and Alex Lane, a national qualifier from the previous year, at 2. Kotrappa and Zhenya were bringing up the bottom of the lineup on this day, though they weren’t the usual singles starters. Swarthmore was coming off back-to-back losses to Redlands and Whittier. The match figured to be another routine Stag demolition of an overmatched opponent, and that’s exactly how it started. CMS came out with a full doubles lineup and swept the Garnet 8-2, 8-2, 8-3. If you had given me 1:100 odds on CMS winning the match at this point I would have bet my entire life savings and called it easy money.

The Stags pulled Lane from the singles lineup to give him some rest for their brutal schedule, but everyone else was pretty much where they usually were. Then all hell broke loose. Swarthmore took 5 first sets, punctuated by Zach Kelm’s tiebreaker win over Warren Wood in the first. Kotrappa gave CMS the 4-0 lead with a quick win at 5, but Swat answered with quick wins from Max Kaye and Daniel Park at 4 and 6, respectively, to put themselves within striking distance. As an observer, I thought that the ship had been righted for CMS when Alex Johnson won the second set at love, and I was certain CMS would win when both Wood and Erani won their second sets. The rest is history. Swarthmore inexplicably got early breaks in the third sets at 2 and 3 before Kelm broke late against wood. All three Garnets won, and rankings chaos ensued. CMS dropped all the way to 18 in the rankings behind the likes of Whittier and Mary Washington. Looking at these rankings today makes me feel viscerally uncomfortable.

The Buffalo Wild Wings Match

This has to be one of the goofier matches in D3 tennis history. At the time, we had a very persistent Whitewater fan hounding us at the blog talking about how they were going to make the Elite Eight that year. Their main argument was that their previous year’s #1 was playing #5 and they had an unstoppable D1 transfer in Ben Shkylar. I’ve always liked Whitewater’s blue collar work ethic, but the self-promotion was getting on my nerves. They were playing a P-P team that was struggling with injuries and a string of 5-4 defeats. All signs were pointing to a Whitewater victory. P-P took two doubles matches (as they tend to do), but things went south when Whitewater won 4 first sets and split the two  matches in which P-P had won the first sets. At one point, Whitewater took a 4-2 lead with straight sets wins at 1, 4, and 6, but that’s when things started to get a little goofy. Pomona-Pitzer took three-setters at 2 and 3 (CHUDDY), but Whitewater’s Andrew Bayliss took the second set over P-P’s KWei to seize the momentum in a match so long it made Isner-Mahut look like a proset. Then, the lights went out…

The match had gone on so long that the automatic timer on the lights shut off the lights on the court and both teams had to wait 30 minutes as Coach Belletto went to get the lights turned back on, prompting comparisons to these commercials. When the lights came back on, Bayliss continued his inceindiary play, racing out to a 5-0 lead (maybe 5-1) in the 3rd set before KWei came clawing back. He held for 5-2 before saving a match point on a semi-miraculous slice backhand pass to break again. The momentum had swung and before long KWei was getting court-stormed after capping off a 7-5 third set win. Twitter went crazy, and a disappointing P-P season took a definitive turn for the better.

The DIII Mascot Challenge

Speaking of the Warhawks, I had tried monetizing the blog for the first and only time, and I was looking to drum up some interest during the offseason of my second season as a writer when I decided to create the DIII mascot challenge. Everyone loves mascots. Everyone loves brackets. I figured we couldn’t go wrong by combining the two. What ensued was more ridiculous than anything I could have predicted. The early round of the tournament went about as I expected them to, but then the supporters from Whitewater and Tufts (two of the larger schools in the Division) started getting the word out to their fanbases, and vote totals for the teams jumped into the thousands. In the finals, the Warhawks started running away with the vote, but I wanted to keep things close to keep people coming back to the site, so I surreptitiously increased Tufts’ vote totals. In the end, tens of thousands of people ended up voting on the poll and this one post got more comments than any other post in blog history because people kept trying to vote by commenting. Of course, I didn’t steal the victory from the Warhawks because they deserved it, and I used the meager ad revenue to purchase an engraved trophy. They put it in their trophy case at some point. I hope it’s still there.

GoldfishGate

This wasn’t one of those moments that was necessarily better or worse for the existence of The Blog, but The Blog certainly amplified it. The backstory here is that Bowdoin, perpetually the NESCAC’s little brother, was playing well under a new head coach, and seemingly headed to back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances when they had to forfeit the rest of their season, including post-season play due to a “hazing” scandal. How were they hazing, you might ask? Well, obviously, they were “forcing” freshmen to swallow live goldfish (not the cheesy kind). Technically, if they were uncomfortably with the live goldfish, they were aloud to opt for a dead goldfish (still not the cheesy kind, though).

I’m not condoning these actions by any means. There are much better ways to haze team build, but the absurdity of it all seemed like something that could only happen in DIII tennis. Thanks to The Blog, everybody knew about it within ten seconds of it happening, and the hashtag #GoldfishGateBridge was briefly trending (not on Twitter, just in my heart). Ridiculous.

Incidentally, those freshmen who swallowed a goldfish just won a national championship. Correlation isn’t causation, but it has to be considered.

This tweet

self-explanatory. In other news, I am the spirit of the twelve year-old playing Halo on Xbox live who has made love to everyone’s mother in a degrading fashion.

Pomona-Pitzer’s 2015 5-4 Magic

Pomona-Pitzer’s 2015 season got off to an inauspicious start. They lost their first ranked match of the season 5-4 to Bates on 3-set wins from Ben Rosen and Brent Feldman. After that, all they did was win 9 consecutive 5-4 matches against Mary Washington, CMU, Bowdoin, Tufts, Skidmore, Middlebury, Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, and Gustavus Adolphus. Ironically, two of their biggest wins of the year (ranking-wise) came by a 6-3 count over Amherst and Williams. After a couple matches started going their way, it was a little bit like watching Steph Curry on a hot night throwing up heat-check after heat-check. You don’t need to watch because you know it’s going in. They finished the season with 6 D3 losses: Bates, Redlands, and CMS four times. My only regret is that they didn’t get a chance to play someone other than the clandestine national champs to get to the Elite Eight because they deserved better.

Selection Monday

This year alone, the blog received well over 10,000 views on Selection Monday. Every year, the day provides the most traffic for the blog, and it often provides discussion, analysis, and justifiable rage. Sometimes all three in one hilarious comment (look for Bates Fan). Doing the math, if we average 12 players per team times 40 ranked teams, add parent per player, times 2 divisions + a handful of coaches, + the head coach from Yeshiva, there are about 2000 individuals across this country that have a stake in DIII tennis. I know that doesn’t take alumni into consideration, but just this year we averaged about five views per person. The only other plausible explanation is that D3AS is sitting alone in a basement hitting refresh every eight seconds for 24 hours. On second thought, that’s probably more likely. Skip this one.

Pranks

At this point, it is well-known that I enjoy a good April Fool’s Day Prank. I think it goes back to the time my mother shattered any remaining trust I had in the world by telling me she was adopting a baby girl because she always wanted a girl when I was five years old. You know, the good old days. One tennis fan out there is still trying to wrap his head around why I would purposefully write the wrong thing in this little ditty. I sneak one in every year, but by far my favorite prank moment came at the expense of the good old Headmaster. I know it’s gauche to laugh at my own jokes, but I’ve been maintaining a low-grade giggle for the past two years since he posted this one (check out his second block of text).

The T-Shirt Debacle

Player of the week/month has always been my favorite consistent segment that we’ve done at The Blog. Even if it comes from a bunch of anonymous goons, it’s nice for the players to get a little recognition for all of their hard work, especially when they have a particularly good week. Last year, I believe it was D3NE who had the idea to give t-shirts to those who won a monthly award. We all chipped in and got some shirts, and we were all ready to go when we got an e-mail from a coach saying that giving out a t-shirt would constitute an NCAA violation. It’s unfathomable that we overlooked NCAA sanctum 17, section VI, sub-section ii, paragraph 137, line 40, where it clearly states that, “under no circumstances should anyone have fun while participating in any NCAA sanctioned activity.” Surprisingly, players weren’t willing to sacrifice eligibility for a t-shirt, so we ended up dropping them off in secure locations at nationals for people to pick up. In my mind, that’s much sketchier than what we were planning on doing originally, and we tried not to lace our t-shirts with too much acid, but I’m sure some snuck in there along the way. Apologies.

The People

I never would’ve imagined that I would end up becoming such good friends with people I have never met in person. I text these people I don’t know far more frequently than either of my parents, my other friends… or my girlfriend, which, now that I’m typing it, sounds like either the beginning of a horror movie or the end of Manti Te’o’s credibility as a human being. Between my fellow bloggers and the other people I e-mail and message on Twitter, I really like shooting the breeze about DIII tennis with all of you. The people in the DIII community are generally kind and passionate about what they do. I come across a lot of tragedy during the day, and it’s nice to spend a little time with something innocent and fun when I come home.

I’ll get back down off my soap box. If anyone has any questions at all, please feel free to e-mail me at d3tennisguy@gmail.com.