March 17, 2011
WACO, Texas - The 31st-ranked Baylor men's tennis team followed up its historic win over No. 1 ranked Tennessee with a 6-1 victory against No. 28 Louisville on Thursday night at the Baylor Tennis Center.
"I was really pleased," head coach Matt Knoll said. "I thought we had a great night. We have a lot of respect for Louisville, because they beat us last year with the exact same six guys that they played tonight. We knew they were going to be tough and I was really proud of the effort from our guys tonight."
The win was Baylor's eighth in its last nine matches and propelled the Bears to a 10-3 overall record. At home, BU is now 9-2 and against ranked opponents this season the Bears are 5-3.
For the 11th-straight match the Bears got off to a hot start and won the doubles point. At the No. 1 spot, the seventh-ranked duo of Roberto Maytin and John Peers made quick work of 24th-ranked Austen Childs and Viktor Maksimcuk, 8-5. Maytin and Peers are now 10-1 in dual-match play and have won nine straight matches.
Julian Bley and Kike Grangeiro then proceeded to wrap up the point for Baylor as they defeated Simon Childs and Amaury Derognat, 8-3 at the No. 3 spot. The pair is now 11-1 on the season.
With the point decided Sergio Ramirez and Jordan Rux fell to Alejandro Calligari and Robert Hall, 8-7(2). It was the second straight loss for BU's No. 2 team as their record dropped to 7-3.
"All our doubles teams are playing well right now," Knoll said. "Again our No. 2 team lost, but they lost in a tiebreaker and tiebreakers are kind of a coin flip. We had a chance in all the doubles matches and that has been a good point for us and it was another good point for us tonight."
The singles portion of the match featured five tiebreak sets and a trio of three-set matches.
For the match, Knoll removed Jordan Rux from the lineup and reinserted Dennis Lengsfeld at the No. 3 position. The move would pay off as Lengsfeld captured a 6-7(4), 6-1, 6-4 over S. Childs, but it was Baylor's bottom half of the lineup that claimed the match early for BU.
"We put Gorilla (Lengsfeld) in and he responded with a great performance," Knoll said. "We need to be able to get our teeth into every match on every court."
At the No. 4 position, the 96th-ranked Maytin posted a 6-0, 6-2 win against Robert Hall that upped the sophomore's dual match record to 9-2. The 99th-ranked Grangeiro was not far behind Maytin as he raced past the 122nd-ranked Calligari 6-1, 6-4 at the five spot.
To clinch the match, Ramirez rebounded from an opening set loss to get past Maksimcuk 6-7(6), 6-1, 6-0 on court two. The win snapped a two-match losing streak for the BU senior and improved his record to 7-5.
With match decided, Bley beat Andrew Carter 7-6(2), 6-4 at the bottom of the lineup, before Lengsfeld got his sixth win of the season. To close out the night Peers lost his third straight match to a top-20 ranked player. The 16th-ranked A. Childs downed the BU senior 7-6(3), 6-7(2), 6-3 at the No. 1 spot. Peers is now 10-3 in dual-match play.
The loss drops Louisville to 9-9 on the season and it evens the all-time series between the Bears and Cardinals at one match apiece.
Baylor will now close out its nine-match homestand by hosting No. 12 Stanford on Tuesday at 5 p.m. The Bears are 10-0 all-time versus the Cardinal program.
