ASouth Stream of Consciousness – ARIANA GRANDE EDITION

ASouth Stream of Consciousness – ARIANA GRANDE EDITION

Well, my loyal readers. I’m on a plane to sunny California right now, which equates to a 6.5 hour flight in coach seating and nothing much to do because WE DON’T HAVE FREE WIFI YET. Given my predicament, I am figuring that there’s not much else to do but blog away. I have no WiFi, as I just said, so that means its time for one of those famous Stream of Consciousness articles that I made “famous” last year. By the way, I did download a few Netflix shows to watch offline (specifically Russian Doll and NARCOS Mexico), but I figured I’d use the time I had to be “productive” with it. I realize that a stream of consciousness article should be words on a page, totally unplanned, but I am going to do some type of organization with this one.

I was thinking about how I could format this article and I’ve decided to liken some of the music I’m listening to to some of the things that I’m seeing in DIII Tennis today. Any of you fans of D3ASouth have to know what’s playing, right? That’s right. It’s Ari, and the album is thank u, next. Call me Starbucks because I’m about to collab with the 2019 Queen of Pop. Get ready for a wild ride of an article that might make no sense but hell, it’s going to be fun. Bonus points if you’ve listened to the album multiple times already. Best part of this format is that you can’t skip my BS to get to the team you want to read. Sorry if you were going to, my ego can’t handle that. Let’s get turbulent and vomit some DIII Tennis sh*t on a MS Word page while I fly.

The album: thank u, next – diii tennis style.

track one: imagine

This is going to be fun. Watch me as I incorporate some type of lyric or the theme of ari’s amazing music into my thoughts on DIII tennis. For track one, I’d like to start by talking about the Women’s side of The Blog. Did you all know that the Blog has beaten last year’s February views by over 400 per day for the whole month? I can’t say enough about the work of the women’s bloggers and their effort to get a side of this site that was largely untapped up and running. If you haven’t noticed, they wrote season previews for every one of their teams, they wrote indoors previews, got a podcast up with the best DIII player of all time, and who knows what is next. If you want to follow them on twitter, their handles are following:

@D3ASWomens @D3NEWomens @D3CWomens @d3_westwomens

The women’s side of the blog is growing faster than ever. While they aren’t yet matching the men’s side in terms of quantity of content, it certainly can happen. And as Ari sings in her opening track, “imagine a world like that.” What a world that would be. So, kudos to the women’s bloggers, keep on keepin’ on. And again as Ariana croons, they’ll just keep on going “click. click. click….. and post.”

track two: needy

Recently in the group chat, D3RegionalNEC described me as having “ridiculously high standards.” What was the conversation, you ask? Well, we were debating on the chat how to grade Coach Jason Box of Swarthmore’s first season. Some of us said undecided so far, despite Swarthmore falling to around 30 in the Power Rankings. It’s tough to judge because of the transition from Coach Mullan to Coach Box this past year. But then, D3RegionalAS pointed out that the Garnet brought in a couple of good recruits. I mentioned that Swarthmore really did not need to replace much, given that Mark Fallati was a very replaceable #1 singles player. This then started a whole debate about how to judge players. Last year, Swarthmore was ranked #19 in the nation – is it unreasonable for me to expect Fallati to be a top 20 #1 singles player? Am I grading him on too strong of a curve? Am I being… needy? Happy to discuss in the comments – RegionalNEC has a lot to say about the subject.

Either way, I do believe that the jury is still out for Coach Box and his new position in Swarthmore. It’s hard to change the culture in just one year where your recruits are largely not yours. This man was Coach of the Year in both Men’s and Women’s last year. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect a lot from the guy!

track three: NASA

This is the worst track on the album. I will not allow myself to relate it to DIII Tennis.

track four: bloodline

Oh gosh, I love the twitterverse. Recently, we were able to see twitter mistakes in action, as the normally polite and sportsmanlike twitter account of Trinity TX Tennis (I’ll change your logo in power rankings soon, I promise) had a bit of a slip-up, calling D1 Laredo out for hooking on twitter. It largely went unnoticed, but here at the blog we miss nothing. Word on the street the twitter account is managed by none other than blog favorite Christian Settles, son of Coach Settles of CMS. In fact, Papa Settles himself sent over a rebuke on twitter. (None of this is documented because unfortunately we didn’t pull an internet and screenshot everything immediately). Let’s pan to the Settles family dinner:

Christian: #guessballmarksdontmatter

Coach Settles: “DON’T WANT YOU IN MY BLOODLINE” – Ariana Grande, Bloodline

Christian: *sad*

All jokes aside, I want to talk about twitter etiquette. What makes that different than Nick Chua posting a straight video of the Wash U hook at Indoors? Just because he has video evidence? Do we not trust a twitter user’s eyesight? It’s quite funny how those two tweets were taken given that they are basically saying the same thing. Either way, if the drama is unfolding, I’m all for it, so keep on tweeting stuff out people. As long as it’s not me getting crushed for it. People on twitter give us crap all the time. At the end of the day, Christian… no need to apologize. We’re going to have to let this sh*t go.

track five: fake smile

One of my favorite tracks on the thank u, next album. On this track, Ari sings “I can’t fake… another smile.” And neither can I, when I talk about teams that are one-hit wonders. The team that I’ve set my sights on in this paragraph? The RPI Engineers. After coming off an all-time best conference championship and a top 30 ranking, the Engineers came into this year as a feel-good story of 2018. Everyone loves talking about an underdog knocking off an established conference winner like Skidmore. Once you break through that ceiling, however, people expect more of you. Clearly, RPI came into this year a bit overconfident and *gasp* might not have worked as hard these past few months as a conference champion. They are coming off a loss to previously unranked Rochester. They just beat Cal Lutheran, who should be in the 50-60 range, by the score of 5-4. This is a team that was ranked TWENTY FIVE last year and had everyone smiling, especially D3RegionalNEC. Well, Engineers, this is a new year. And you know what? “**** a fake smile.”

track six: bad idea

I GOT A BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD IDEA.

That bad idea is joining the MIT tennis team when you’re not fully committed. We have barely seen the MIT men’s team yet this season, but the word on the street is that they have lost one of their top players in Victor Cheng. This is something that we’ve seen year after year, with top talent quitting the MIT tennis team to focus on their rigorous academic workload or just to join the fraternity that makes the really good jungle juice (this is totally unproven). I have nothing against MIT – it’s just hard to see the same stuff happen every year to a team that has a lot of talent and honestly, a good amount of players that really like tennis. Shout-out to Tyler Barr and Alex Cauneac, and hell, even Sean Ko. Not sure if any MIT recruits read the blog, but if you’re not ready to put up, get ready to shut up. It’s a tired act to go through a year and bail out. No, let’s make some robots.

track seven: make up

Mary Washington Eagles, I see you. My coverage of your team has been fairly harsh over the past few years, mostly because of my “ridiculously high standards (thanks NEC).” This past week, you ended some long losing streaks to TWO teams out West in dramatic fashion. Mary Washington has been one of the most consistent teams, if that is what you want to call it, for the past seven years of my blog tenure. Let’s just go to some tweets from my fellow bloggers – because the STREAK IS OVER!!!!!!!!!!

THE STREAK IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE STREAK https://t.co/tBgzpsG8G2

— D3 Northeast (@D3Northeast) March 9, 2019

Some losing streaks die real hard https://t.co/mywCDOC29O

— D3West (@d3_west) March 5, 2019

Wow this UMW keys to the match section might be a work of art pic.twitter.com/C6PjXuoCx7

— d3AtlanticSouth (@d3AtlanticSouth) March 9, 2019

Mary Washington has only a few matches on the schedule worth watching, one of them with another ASouth opponent currently ranked in the top 15, the CMU Tartans. Mary Wash has already done a lot this year to make this a successful year but the season is not over. Chris Newport just pushed the same Redlands team that almost beat the Eagles a couple of days before. Mary Wash has me rooting for them once again. Ari, take it away.

“I love it when we make….up.”

track eight: ghostin’

Ghosting. A common term in today’s online dating trends. NewD3Central oftentimes tells me that he gets ghosted or ghosts on someone on average of two times a week. I digress. Let’s talk a little bit about this DIII season’s most disappointing ghost, the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. It’s hard to have success when you don’t have a coach, but at least Cruz decided they’d hire a coach basically as old as a player at the very last second. Not a great recipe for success and that has shown. UCSC has fallen off the map with a ton of losses to unranked teams and are basically out of the conversation for a Pool B berth at the end of the year. With the fall of the team has also come the fall of their #1 player, Chad LeDuff, who notoriously took DIII Tennis on by storm last year. Mr. LeDuff has exited this spring season as fast as he entered the scene last year. That is sad. If Cruz is going to make any noise, they will need to win every match that LeDuff plays in. Let me tell you that we are not trending in the right direction. Coach Soper has his work cut out for him in his first year. I have not heard much about the situation in Cruz, but based on results this thing is looking like a sinking ship. I have always felt compassion for a team that deals with a minimal budget and other challenges (even if the weather is awesome), but this year is a different beast. The Slugs are getting salted.

track nine: in my head

The Carnegie Mellon Tartans. One of the most hotly debated teams in the blog group chat that just so happens to be one of my teams. The Tartans have been 2019’s most exciting team to follow to date, with three (count’em, three) 5-4 matches on the year with top 15 teams. Their 5-4 loss to Wash U is already being discussed as one of the best matches of the year.  They were the victims of the sweep and grind at home underdog story Case Western Spartans in the second round of indoors. And just yesterday, the men in plaid escaped an almost chokefest down in Orlando against those same Spartans, eeking out a 5-4 victory after taking a 2-1 lead after doubles. They were swept in the previous meeting, so the thought was that they would roll through this match after the doubles lead. CMU’s top 3, which was so dominant last year, has become decidedly human. Ray Boppana has lost three setters in all of the aforementioned matches. Daniel Levine can’t go a match without losing a set somewhere. Without the emergence of #4 singles Robert Levin and #5 singles Clark Safran, we’re talking about a team that would be looking more like a top 20 team than the Elite 8 team that I expected. At the end of the day, CMU got revenge for their Case loss and now looks to a Wash U match today to avenge another loss (NOTE: they didn’t). So, is this a team that is actually good and just needs some of their best guys to get it together, or is it all… in my head?

track ten: 7 rings

Rings? Let’s talk Bob Hansen and the Middlebury Panthers. Is it just me, or are the defending champion Middlebury Panthers really underrated right now? They are ranked #1 in the Power Rankings but it seems like half the DIII tennis fans out there don’t know that their full lineup is. It is pretty crazy that this team lost a few key seniors and yet are still easily the favorites for the NCAA Title at the end of the year. Sorry, Chicago and CMS, but the man’s gotta go with the defending champs and a dude with rings like Gregg Popovich. Middlebury just embarked on their schedule and will be taking Spring Break in a few weeks, where I believe they will take on their biggest challenger in my mind, the CMS Stags (this could totally be not true). With the best top two in the nation and it’s not even close, we need to put ourselves on alert – do we really want the dudes from Middlebury to go back to back? Middlebury is a threat to sweep you in doubles and drop you in four sets at #1 and #2. Oh, they also have top recruits at #3-6, so the buck doesn’t stop there. Middlebury is your far and away #1 right now, bar none. Maybe I should reflect that in my Power Rankings.

track eleven: thank u, next

Whenever we talk about matches, we often talk about them in a vacuum without thinking about what happened the past couple of days or could happen in the future. I have no idea what a guy is feeling from behind my computer screen. I’ve been there, done that. There were days that I’d get sick or see one of my teammates get a bout of insomnia before a big match. There are things that UTR can’t measure, and one of them is fatigue. Take a look at the schedule that Coach Fried has put together for the Wesleyan Men’s team down in one of the most humid places in the country. Wesleyan will be playing Kenyon, trinity TX, Wash U, and CMU, all in succession on Spring Break. That’s right, four matches in four days, with their most important matches coming at the back end of that slate. Wesleyan will be playing matches faster than Ari goes through boyfriends, and I for one am very concerned with how the young Cardinals team will be able to handle so many tough matches in a row. With today’s 5-3 win over Kenyon, clearly Coach Fried was thinking ahead by agreeing with Coach Thielke to shut down the #1 singles match midway through the third set as the match was decided. Wesleyan is up against a huge challenge. God forbid something happens, at least Princeton Carter’s a smash.

track twelve: break up with pool A, im bored

Thank you, D3NEWRegional, for once again bringing up the debate that will withstand the tests of time. Everyone knows this is a tired argument. Just give us a tournament with the top 15 teams in it and everyone else battles for the rest of the scraps.

ONE LAST TIME

Shout-out to all of you that get the reference of this section. Throwback! Anyways, someone get me a Cloud Macchiato that I’ll drink just because of Ari’s endorsement, even though it actually did not taste good at all.

(ASouth Grande Tweet)

Catch you after my vacation peeps. ASouth, OUT.