Youthful M. Tennis Preps for Season

There is little holdover from last spring’s men’s tennis team, the squad that battled its way to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. Gone from the Crimson are two coaches, a now-sophomore who played in last year’s lineup and, of course, the five invaluable seniors who graduated. No time to live in the past, though—rather, this weekend’s Harvard Fall Invitational featured the debuts of several new additions to the Crimson.

Joining the team in place of the five graduates and sophomore Jack Li, who left the team to concentrate on other activities, are three freshmen. For the trio, it is a time of adjustments.

“You can see the transition they’re going to have to make to balance not just going to a regular high school,” explained Harvard’s new assistant coach, Terry London. “You know, [they could] sleep whenever they wanted to sleep and play tennis whenever they wanted to play [in high school]. Now, it becomes really regimented, and it’s taken a toll on the body.”

Said newcomer Dan Nguyen, who watched from the stands with a groin injury, “[Compared] to college tennis, my game is rather raw, so to speak, so just practicing and training with these guys [is helpful].

“They’ve experienced a lot here,” he explained, “and I just hope to learn from them and further develop my own game.”

As Nguyen and classmate Ashwin Kumar sat out for the weekend’s matches, the third freshman, Cameron Parker, lost 6-2, 3-6, 6-4 in the first round of the ‘B’ Singles Flight.

The Crimson veterans experienced similar results. Harvard did not advance a player past the first round of the ‘A’ Singles Flight, as Brandon Chiu, Shantanu Dkaha, Gideon Valkin and captain Jason Beren all fell early.

While these matches will not affect Harvard’s dual-match record or ranking down the road, they do prove useful as diagnostic tools.

“Having a tournament at your own site early in the year is a great, efficient way to get the guys challenge matches that aren’t really challenge matches,” London said. “It’s a great way to see them play...under pressure, and you don’t have to travel anywhere to do it.”

But what of the results? This is, after all, a team that hovered around the No. 20 mark all last spring.

“I think it was good to find out where some guys were,” London said diplomatically, “and they weren’t maybe where they or we thought they were, but now we’ll adjust their training accordingly.”

And London knows all about that, as he spent years traveling with and training professional players before joining the Crimson.

Beren deemed London “the most important addition we have made this year to the team,” mentioning his “high level of energy” and calling him a “great instructional force.”

It was a lucky addition, too—that required the perfect timing.

London had trained out of Boston for quite some time, but when Peter Mandeau, the Crimson’s old assistant coach, retired from Harvard and one of London’s players had to undergo surgery, everything seemed to fall into place.

“I thought if I was going to try out college coaching, there was only one place that I’d try it,” London explained, “and that’s here, under [Harvard coach Dave Fish ’72], so things just kind of fit.”

This weekend might not have been the best introduction to collegiate coaching for London, though the doubles teams did fare significantly better than did the singles players.

The sophomore duo of Max Tedaldi and Scott Denenberg lost 9-8 (2) in the second round, while the senior pair of Beren and Jordan Bohnen advanced to the semifinals before losing 8-4.

The big winners of the weekend were senior Jonathan Chu and sophomore Gideon Valkin. The two were not doubles partners last year, but they had little trouble dispatching a team from Brown 8-4 after going up by an initial 6-0 mark.

And so, with the tennis season officially underway, the Crimson has both much to anticipate and much to build upon.

“We have a quite different team this year,” said senior Martin Wetzel. “We still have lots of talent in our team, and I would say that we do not have a worse team compared to last year, but just a younger and less experienced one.”

Which is why London isn’t too broken up about the weekend’s losses.

“No one day is really disappointing,” he explained. “You look at the whole year, and if [players] can take all the disappointments of today and turn them into positives so that they’re not disappointments when it’s actually a more important part of the season, then this becomes really useful.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.