#HumpDay Special – DIII Tennis Goes H.A.M.

D3AtlanticSouth

If you were at work, traveling for spring break, at Indian Wells tennis complex, sleeping, or saving the world, you missed one of the better days we’ll see all year in DIII Tennis today.  I think a lot of you know the results, but I am sure there are some stragglers that will read this tomorrow morning and realize there was a reason why my twitter account blew up their timeline yesterday.  I don’t have the links to the results yet because they are so fresh, but here’s the breakdown.  (Power Rankings shown below)

#13 CMU defeats #2 Trinity TX, 5-4

#18 Redlands defeats #19 Wesleyan, 5-4

#15 Pomona defeats #14 Bowdoin, 5-4

First off, I’d like to say that our power rankings are pretty legit.  Blogging aside, today was freaking AWESOME!!!! I was literally glued to my phone/computer screen the whole day, which doesn’t bode well for the company I work for, but priorities are priorities.  What I’m going to do with this article is take you through a chronological timeline of today’s matches.  If you missed it, this will hopefully get you a bi caught up on the drama that occurred today.  By the way, there will be not much analysis in this post.  I’m just pretty excited and I think everyone should share in that enthusiasm.  Let’s get started with the first match of the day, Trinity vs. CMU.

Looks like I wasn’t crazy at all. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.  The reason I thought CMU would have a shot at winning was a few things.  First, CMU has always been a hit or miss team.  But, the day before, Trinity TX literally almost lost to Cal Lutheran, and D3West tweeted this.

A combination of these two things, plus my belief that most of the teams from #2-#12 can beat each other on any given day contributed to me thinking that CMU had a chance to win.  You’ll see I felt stronger about that, but didn’t make it public.  The match started and the struggling CMU doubles looked bad, except at #1 doubles where the seniors Duncan and Heaney-Secord just went straight fire.  The #2’s came back for CMU, but ended up getting broken at 7-7 to go down 2-1.  Most people would count Carnegie out here, but I thought their singles was primed for a potential upset.  Then, this happened.

Carnegie went up big in four of the 5 matches and kept things close in the other two.  Trinity had escaped Kenyon with SIX split set matches and FIVE split set wins.  They escaped CLU as well in a similar fashion, albeit not as epic.  Anyways, we ended up with CMU taking #1 and #5 easily.  We eventually ended up here.

At this point, we were getting live updates from everywhere.  Big shoutout to both Dante Quazzo, HenHouse twitter account, Nick Ballou (of course) and the other people who were also updating me (you know who you are).  A lot of others were engaging the bloggers on twitter with what was a great match. The senior Duncan ended up closing out Neiss at #4 singles at 6-5 up with a break.  Fun fact is that Neiss served and volleyed on that point.  You gotta respect the stones on Neiss for that one.  He fought tooth and nail for every point against a great player and almost came away with one.  Meanwhile, on court 2, CHS and Skinner fought in a senior duel that just went blow for blow.  At 6-5 and returning, this happened on Match Point #3 for CHS.

Sick match for us to watch and we had a lot of video going back and forth from a ton of the people that were there.  You’d think that was it for the day, but then we realized that we had two more matches – Wesleyan/Redlands and Pomona/Bowdoin.  Both matches pitted two teams just one spot apart in power rankings.  Wesleyan/Redlands was first, and Redlands actually ended up taking a 3-0 lead after doubles and leading all of us to believe that Wesleyan was just another #koolaid team.  Even Old Man Wootton got in on the action.

There were then 0 updates from Wesleyan and Redlands for the span of about 2-3 hours.  Not even Tom Suchodolski was on his game.  Neither was the Wesleyan twitter account, which had promised us score updates.  Gotta get on that, Coach Fried!! Kidding.  With 0 updates for a long time and some rumbling about a close match, I had a feeling things were going to go down to the wire again.

And indeed, we were right.  Redlands ended up winning the match by the score of 5-4.  Normally, this would conclude an awesome day in DIII tennis and we’d all go home, go out for some drinks, and go to sleep and get ready for Stag-Hen.  But, Pomona/Bowdoin decided to give us a treat as well.  NE, what you think?

At first, it didn’t seem like the case.Pomona came out and swept the doubles, leaving us to believe that we’d actually all go home early and be disappointed that every match isn’t the most incredible match ever. I figured that I’d actually have time to make some dinner and watch Better Call Saul that I missed this past Monday.  Or even finish House of Cards.  Anything!  Bowdoin had some other ideas.

Yep, that’s four first sets and eventually a fifth first set for Bowdoin.  That’s a 1 and 1 victory (tweet was wrong) at court #4, and eventually easy cleanups at #3 and #5.  Bowdoin tied up this match and went 0 to 100 real quick (I know you liked that reference, sagehentennis).  Again, we were in for another marathon matchup.  Sagehen tennis continued to give us point by point updates, a random twitter account named @HateD3Tennis continued to engage us on twitter, and people in general were messaging up a storm.

Another 4-4 match that went into the third set, making it three on the day.  Another matchup involving a senior putting guts on the line for his team.  Word out of Claremont was that there was definitely a lot of volume coming from the Conor Hudson side, but overall the two #BenchMobs were totally on point.  The atmosphere was great and it felt like an NCAA match.  It certainly had the quality of one. At 2-2, Hudson went all cluck cluck on Trinka from Bowdoin and the rest is history.  He played an amazing 4 games after that, which of course, included with a celebration.

Chuddy, you probably have to work on the celebration a bit, but that ace ended another crazy match in DIII tennis land.  Today brought so much to the table and I personally think it showed the beauty of DIII Tennis and everything that we stand for.  We have a popular sport with a lot of integrity, and clearly we have a lot of competition too.  Big shoutout goes to all the teams that participated today, you all made my day much more interesting.  And with that, I will leave you with a few tweets that summed up my day.

And that, my friends, is a great way to end the day.  Until next time (tomorrow). ASouth, OUT.

2 thoughts on “#HumpDay Special – DIII Tennis Goes H.A.M.”

  1. Anon
    March 12, 2015 at 1:43 pm

    This is amazing stuff! Great day of play with teams from all around the nation.

    D3AS, knowing the Stag-Hen is the main focus this weekend, what’s your take on Mary Wash’s matches vs Swarthmore and W&L? Solid Atlantic South matchups.

    Reply
    1. D3AtlanticSouth
      March 12, 2015 at 2:50 pm

      Thanks for the compliment!! It really was an awesome day.

      We will have a regional recap coming out tonight that WILL cover the UMW/Swat/W&L matches, stay tuned!

      Reply

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