First Look: The ASouth Region

I may have just gotten you all a kickoff article for Men’s in general, but that does not mean I will stop there. Despite my overarching responsibilities, it is still my responsibility to cover the ASouth, much to the chagrin of the ASouth teams. Welcome to a sixth year of late articles and embellished information for you Atlantic South homies. I’d like to start this off by wishing safety to the Eagles of Emory and really everyone down south during this pretty deadly hurricane season. Anyways, I think D3NE is kicking us off with his seniors article from last year, which seems a wee bit late but who am I to judge the great work of the creator of the “Wall of Text.”

As a reminder, the teams I will be covering this year are Emory, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, and Mary Washington. RegionalASouth will be covering the rest, which includes Sewanee and Swarthmore despite their solid rankings.  I’ll try to make this more forward looking, going through some of the big stories of the ASouth this year. I don’t think it calls for a 10 questions format, but I’ll try to get every team in here with at least one mention. Okay, so what are some of the stories of the ASouth this year?

The Emory Personality Question

Something about this year’s Emory team makes me feel like this won’t be the team to defend their national championship from last year. As always, I will never count the fightin’ Eagles out of it, but their seniors will need to step up and lead this year (Omsky, Rubinstein, and Bazzarella). I haven’t heard much about the types of captains they project to be, so who knows how that will turn out. The juniors (Jemison, Bouchet, Spaulding) will be relied upon even more to not only fill the top positions in the lineup but potentially to lead as well. There may or may not be a few personalities on this team and it will be interesting to see how Coach Browning manages this. They only have two recruits coming in and we’re not totally sure if both of them will be in the starting lineup. Emory won’t go undefeated this year – how will they handle their inevitable losses?

Rozenvasser’s Sophomore Year

CMU, one of my roller coaster teams who always loves to keep things interesting, is entering an interesting time in their program. The Tartans have even less senior presence than Emory, with only doubles specialist Jeffrey Chen as the contributing senior. They will have to replace the leadership of Kirkov, Wadwani, and Zheng, while also replacing them at the bottom of the lineup. Expect big things from Daniel Levine, who I expect to rise to become the leader and (already is) the best player on this team. I believe that Levine is on track to become potentially the best player in CMU history, even tho AVZ disagrees with me. CMU has to avoid a soph slump from Rozenvasser, who lost some steam at the end of last year after a stellar fall. I’m projecting that the Tartans will need 2 guys to play way better than they did last year to make the playoffs this year. I’d like to think those guys are Mark Prettyman and Vayum Arora. Both struggled last year and they need to reverse that trend. The second half of the season has been unkind to the Tartans, which is another trend they have to reverse. The Tartans have a lot of questions to answer, but they have one rock in Daniel Levine that they can rely on. It’s the other pieces that will need to come together.

New Scheduling Adventures!

I’m hearing a lot of rumors this year but we can already confirm some of them from team sites that we’ll get some crazy dual matches. CMU already has Wesleyan and Wash U on the schedule out West, with one match still to be posted, so who knows what it’s going to be. Those are two matches that will get them some Pool C action that will basically put their own destiny in their hands. Emory is going back up to the Middlebury area to potentially take on the favorites for this year’s national title. These two teams haven’t really had the best of relationships over the years, so that will be fun to watch! In regards to Hopkins and UMW, well, they basically have the same schedules. Don’t get me started on UMW’s schedule because I don’t want to put more time than I need to into that.  All I know is that I’ll be writing a lot of previews between teams I probably haven’t written before and I enjoy that.

Hopkins says Goodbye

A big storyline of last year (at least here on the Blog) was the injury to Michael Buxbaum and Hopkins rallying behind the #AllInForMike movement. It might have been one of the first times that we’ve seen a Hopkins team really rally behind a cause instead of perform as a team of individuals, and they were a sexy pick to pull another Elite 8 trip out of their hats. Unfortunately for ASouth fans, they fell short to a much better Wesleyan team that swept them in doubles. Lost in the Buxbaum chatter was the importance of another player, Jeremy Dubin, who made a nice run to the quarterfinals of NCAAs and showed why he was one of the more enigmatic players in DIII Tennis. I was about to check who Hopkins brought in this year to replace these two guys but Tennis Recruiting has been down for the whole day and that makes me sad. They must be watching Week 2 of the NFL, which I totally don’t blame them for. (Update: they’re back!) It looks like Hop has brought in a couple of four stars and a dearth of three stars to try and soften the blow. It’s a lot of recruits but we’ve always been wary of saying that all of these guys are super dedicated to tennis. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hopkins had a practice match for the last spot on the team communicated to them in an unceremonious fashion. I’m not expecting great things from the Jays this year, but they’ve proven me both right and wrong in the past. I miss Buxbaum and Dubin.

Facts from Mary Washington

Mary Washington has had a tough go of things int he past 8 years, but most particularly in the past 3-4 years.  After topping out in the top 15 in 2014, they have fallen fast with a drop that is unprecedented amongst the other DIII teams.  Just last year, they lost the CAC Championship for the first time in 15+ years to Christopher Newport, who began the year ranked outside of the top 40.  This is a team that ranks among the best in facilities and oftentimes brings in solid recruiting classes of 2-3 star players, but UMW is quite clearly on a downtrend as of late. To make matters worse, they’ve had a top 2 player quit the past couple of years (Gilmore in 2016, Griffin in 2017) which is not a very inspiring trend. Let me hit you with a couple of facts that will prove to you that Mary Washington probably needs to switch some things up (like, the schedule).

Mary Washington has a 14 match losing streak against Redlands and Pomona.

You got that right folks, Mary Washington has not beaten either of these two teams on Spring Break in the past SEVEN years. Despite not beating either of these teams in the past seven years, UMW continues to schedule them consistently even though there are plenty of teams out West when UMW plays. Why not switch it up?! I don’t understand.

Mary Washington has gone 1-33 against teams that have finished in the top 15 in the past 8 years.

A team that many consider to be a very solid team has posted a 3% winning percentage against the top half of DIII in the past 8 years. This is coming from a team that used to be perennially in the top 15 and at least 20 for a few years. Mary Washington as a program needs something to turn around their fortunes, otherwise dips outside of the top 30-40 range may become the norm.

Conclusion

I will say I don’t really like going into regional predictions as there are a ton of things that can happen between now and well, tomorrow, so I’ll skip the whole Player of the Year type jazz and just conclude this article. I was able to hit on all four of my teams in detail so shoutout to the rest of the blog team for giving me the opportunity to only cover 4 teams this year as well as the general blog coverage. All in all, I have some very interesting storylines this year as each of my teams definitely have questions surrounding their potential. While I have the defending champions, it’s a new year, and unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t dwell on the past for my accomplishments. And with that, I leave you. ASouth, OUT.

P.S. I won’t be posting this after every article, but I did want to remind everyone about the donation box we’ve set up on the site. We’ve already gotten a few generous donations already and we couldn’t be more thankful. Again, totally voluntary and this site will always provide free content, and anything is appreciated. You guys rock.