COLLEGE PARK, Md. - The AU men's tennis (1-4) team lost, 5-2, to the Maryland Terrapins (3-0) Sunday afternoon. The Eagles had experienced a brilliant victory against winless North Carolina - Greensboro the day before by a score of 7-0 for its first win of the season.
"The AU team fights very hard," said Jim Laitta, the Terps' coach. "These are top matches. I think both teams are really good."
And fight hard they did. The Eagles first managed to win two of the three doubles matches, doing an especially good job on break-point opportunities. The pairs of seniors Juancarlo Vasquez and Nicolas Frayssinoux and freshman Josh Levitz and junior Ben Weltman earned AU the doubles point.
However, they then had more trouble with the single matches.
Indeed, most of the sets were close, with Levitz dropping two sets by 7-6 scores to Michael Coleman. After a struggle, Vasquez lost sets, 6-3 and 6-4 to Andrew Orban. Senior Sebastian Proisey dropped sets by scores of 6-4 and 6-3 to Nickolai Nielsen.
AU eventually lost five of six singles matches.
Despite a very balanced team in terms of ages, as well as nationalities (the team includes two from France, one from Puerto Rico and one from Mexico), the Eagles were overwhelmed by Maryland.
"Of course we are a little disappointed we did not win," said Frayssinoux, who won AU's lone match over Maryland's Andreas Vaage-Nilsen. "They just played better than us. We have a very good team and we did the best we could."
AU's next match is Friday at Old Dominion.
