Elite 8 Day 1 Recap

Obviously, today was a big day for us fans here at the DIII Tennis site.  Hope all of you enjoyed following the action as much as us writers did (except D3Central, he’s reading the Onion).   We figured it’d be nice to provide our takeaways from today’s matches, and since The Almighty is doing who knows what, he delegated this recap to me.  Sorry to all of you who don’t enjoy my writing style.  I’m going to keep this thing quick, because we still have plenty of tennis ahead of us.

CMS defeats Middlebury, 5-2

The story of this match was basically how the Stags would play in the absence of their best player.  It is definitely trying circumstances, but today the Stags stepped up big time in the face of adversity.  Everything started with the Middlebury’s sneakily improved doubles taking 2 of 3 from the Stags.  One thing to be concerned about if you are a West Region fan is the fact that the #1 team is bound to struggle from this point on.  Of the remaining #1 teams left, I view CMS’s one team as the underdog against all of them. Not to mention, we had anticipated CMS to dominate at 2 and 3, but they lost in a breaker at 3.  Again, the remaining #3 teams are all very strong as well.  Down 2-1, the Stags came up HUGE.  Without giving up a set, CMS won at #2, 3, 4, and 5 pretty handily to catapult them into the semis. Big time shoutout to Alex Lane, who got the NCAA monkey off his back and came up with a convincing win over Palmer Campbell at #3 singles.  Moving forward, it’s clear that the strength of the CMS lineup is going to be from 3-6.  If they are unable to two doubles matches, it’s really going to be a tough way to take the championship considering the depth of the remaining three teams.  Personally, I still think they are overmatched against Amherst without Wood, but if they can take a lead on the vulnerable Amherst doubles lineup they have a pretty solid shot at winning at #4-6.

Amherst defeats Emory, 5-3

How one tiebreaker can change the tide of the match.  Down 2-0 in doubles already, Amherst was a few points away from going down 3-0 to a strong Emory team.  However, Kahan and Salmiano, who have been coming up big as of late, kept their team alive in the Elite 8 and made sure this match wasn’t decided after doubles.  From there on out, Amherst was able to attack Emory’s weaknesses, as I have called out in my D3AS Elite 8 preview.  The rock solid Amherst lineup took straight set wins at 1-3 singles, setting up a ton of pressure on the bottom of the Eagles lineup, once again.  Big ups to my Amherst X Factor Andrew Yaraghi, who came up with the quickest victory over Wagner we’ve seen a long time, if ever.  Fritz and Kahan were able to shake away their recent slumps and take down two solid players in Halpern and Ruderman.  I’ll also give another shoutout to Rafe Mosetick, for coming back a blowout set down to take another match in a third set tiebreaker to keep Emory alive.  Mosetick is a guy to watch out for the remainder of his career.  The best takeaway from this match for the Jeffs is that they know they are in the top 5 at every singles position.  Everyone needs to note Reindel coming up with a huge win over Will Adams, who has had enormous success this year at 6, as well as Dale who was in a battle at 5 with the senior Kahler.  We know Emory was strong at the bottom, and Amherst proved they were just as strong.  The only things that really worries me from here on out for Amherst is their doubles, which I touched on earlier, as well as their conditioning.  The bottom three guys went three sets on a hot and humid K-Zoo day.  They’ll probably have to battle again tomorrow with the strong CMS bottom 3.  Will they have enough left in the tank for the finals?

Note: I did call out the live scoring on Twitter this afternoon.  Props to some of my followers calling out that Amherst/Emory and Williams/Trinity were being played at a separate site, which seemed to have terrible internet and terrible live scoring.  It still doesn’t excuse the fact that I clicked on a Williams/Trinity link to get an Amherst/Emory score.

Wash U defeats Kenyon, 5-1

I’m not going to waste much time talking about Kenyon in this post, as obviously the focus needs to be on Wash U.  However, I’m very surprised that the Lords were unable to make a run at the end of the match.  They have been known to come back down from huge deficits and fight til the bitter end. This was a sad ending for the careers of Burgin and Williams, who will definitely be missed for their fire and motivation.  Great careers for the both of those guys, and I really respect everything they’ve done.  On to Wash U, who put together a total team performance today and AGAIN proved why you simply do not bet against them come playoff time.  They took a 2-1 lead in doubles with a ridiculously clutch performance by Farah/Cogan, who really surprised me today in beating the Raz/Williams team.  Now that Wash U has a legit 2 doubles team (or it would seem), they definitely have a fighters chance tomorrow against Williams.  The #3 team of Parizher/Hirsh just keeps on rolling, and it’ll be a very interesting matchup tomorrow.  However, singles is what I really wanted to focus on here.  After doubles, D3Tennis and I had agreed that we thought this was going to be a dogfight.  The performance that none of us saw coming today was #3 singles Tim Noack cruising to a win over the previously favored Heerboth.  Heerboth is one of the toughest threes out there and Noack almost made it look easy.  Now, this was a great matchup for Noack in terms of game style, but credit is due where credit is due.  The Bears were then able to finish off the match routinely with their seniors Putterman and Parizher at 1 and 5 singles.  Putterman made routine work of Burgin… and Parizher showed that he probably is the best 5 in the nation.  Wash U looks really amazing right now, considering Kratky was on his way to a win at 4 over Williams and Farah had just taken the first at 6.  This could have easily been a dominant 7-2 victory over Kenyon.  The Bears are officially in the national title discussion, and it’s an oversight by me to say they weren’t previously.

Williams defeats Trinity, 5-1

Well, Trinity is no Nichols, so we should really take this result with a grain of salt.  Ha.  This is exactly why you don’t take matches against extremely lesser teams in the NCAA tournament as predictors of future matches.  If any of you have been in a Williams/Nichols type match, you’d realize that the emotion simply isn’t there.  However, when you’re playing Trinity at Kalamazoo on the Elite 8 national stage, the best is bound to come out.  And the best of Williams made a statement.  They swept potentially the second or third best collective doubles team in the nation, and none of the spots really had to sweat all that much.  Trinity is known to come out strong in doubles and Williams simply squashed them.  After today’s performance, Williams is clearly the best doubles team in the nation, and that gives them a shot in every single match.  Singles is where we get a bit dicey, however.  As predicted, Williams ended up finishing the match at #2 and #3, which happen to be some of their stronger positions.  It’s good to see Sun notch a solid win over a good player, and for Micheli to come up in a third set breaker.  Those two are going to need to get theirs if Williams is going to win it all.  The other spots in the Williams lineup are worrisome to me.  The older Weiss has really struggled at #4 singles all year round, and he seems more fit to be a 5 player than a 4.  However, Chow also does not fit at the 4 spot, leaving them with a hole there and not even a lock at 5.  Chow was in the third set today (does he ever not go 3?) and will need to be drinking that pedialyte from here on out.  Also, interesting decision to pull Page from the lineup and go with the younger Weiss.  I think it was driven off the 3-0 lead, but there was a point where things could have gotten hairy as Trinity battled hard in the singles.  Trinity definitely started poking some holes in the Ephs championship argument, and if this thing comes down to fitness in the finals, the Ephs can point to these matches as the reason why they might be tired.  Oh, and shoutout to my Williams X Factor Felix Sun for taking 2 wins today, as well as Trinity X Factor Erick DelaFuente for winning the last match of his career.  Again, awesome careers for both of these players and both of them are some of the most respected guys in DIII Tennis.

Looking forward to the semi finals, y’all have my predictions in my original preview (considering I got the whole Elite 8 correct).  I don’t think anything changes for tomorrow, and I do believe it’ll be an Amherst/Williams final.  However, that Wash U/Williams match is really scaring me.  I think Wash U can take 1 doubles, and potentially 1, 4, 5, and 6 singles to beat the Ephs in a stunner.  On the Amherst/CMS side, this thing got tighter too considering Dorn/Marino/Lane played lights out today in singles.  It’s gonna be a good day tomorrow.