Crimson Carries Singles, Doubles Play to Top Jaspers

The Manhattan College bus may have broken down two weekends ago, but the Harvard men’s tennis team was firing on all cylinders last night, as it swept the Jaspers 7-0 at the Murr Tennis Center in a match that had been rescheduled from Feb. 11. With the win, the Crimson’s first of the spring season, Harvard proved decisively that it had shed its early-season rust.

The Crimson came out of the gate cool, collected, and craving a win, and went to work quickly on the Jaspers, locking up the win with three easy victories at Nos. 4, 5, and 6 after taking the doubles point with ease.

“We’ve been practicing in a way that I felt that was the kind of match we were capable of,” coach Dave Fish ’72 said. “But you never quite know until you get to play it. We didn’t get to play a week and a half ago, and that was frustrating, because we were primed.”

Indeed, Harvard opened singles play by sweeping all six first sets, with especially wide margins on courts 4, 5 and 6.

At No. 6, sophomore Michael Kalfayan breezed past his opponent 6-1, 6-2, while at No. 5, senior Gideon Valkin crushed his opponent, David Alvarado, 6-2, 6-2 with bullet after bullet from the baseline. Valkin confounded all of Alvarado’s attempts to change the flow of the game with well-placed groundstrokes, often from well behind the baseline.

“Gideon is court savvy,” Fish said, “Once he gets any ball in the middle of the court he knows how to drive it hard enough to bother the guy.”

At No. 4, junior Ashwin Kumar broke out of a funk dating back to Jan. 27 by defeating the Jaspers’ Diego Alvarado 6-3, 6-4. Kumar’s tenacious tennis had Alvarado on his heels from the first serve of the match. Kumar was shuffled back two spots in the lineup after his recent struggles, while senior co-captain Scott Denenberg (No. 2) and junior Dan Nguyen (No. 3) each moved up one spot.

“Everybody gets down on their confidence,” Fish said. “He was down and the other guys had been up, and any time you get to play a little lower, you’re probably going to win some more matches, and if you play up high, you’re going to have some tough ones. He’d played tough guys, lost in three sets, good matches to these guys, but after a while, everybody just feels ‘I need a win.’”

Kumar clearly relished his strong play and the victory it produced for him. After one set of having his lob attempts smashed back in his face, Alvarado shook his head at his coach in despair. Minutes later, after another set went by in a flash, Kumar put away match point, just as Nguyen won his first set on the neighboring court.

Once Kalfayan, Valkin, and Kumar won, the Crimson locked up the win, and the matches on courts 1, 2, and 3 were for pride alone.

Nonetheless, Harvard’s top players each produced gutsy wins.

At No. 1, Clayton came back from being down a break in both sets to beat Bogdan Borta 6-4, 7-5. Borta, a lefty who had beaten Clayton soundly in their two previous meetings, forced Clayton into numerous long rallies after which both players were thoroughly winded. Clayton, for his part, frequently ran around his backhand to unleash fearsome cross-court forehands with high precision to his opponent’s forehand.

“I just wanted to get out here and be as fierce as I could possibly be,” Clayton said. “I make it a point to go be over-energized. In college ball, you just have to go out there and tear it up.”

For Nguyen, two courts over, the long rallies against the Jaspers’ Peter Czink were tearing it up in an undesirable way.

“I’ve played him before, twice,” said Nguyen, who ended up winning 7-6, 6-3. “He’s solid, for sure. A legit player. Every time it’s been long points, we’re dead tired, but good tennis, fun tennis. I’d rather not work that hard to win a match.”

At No. 2, Denenberg stoically overcame the furious shots and circus antics of Mihai Nichifor to win 7-6, 4-6, 10-5. Denenberg won the concluding super-tiebraker going away while his opponent amused the crowd and angered the officials with groans, curses, and a brief dropping of his shorts.

Earlier in the evening, the Crimson clinched the doubles point with a heavily reorganized lineup that featured the return of junior Gareth Doran and sophomore Sasha Ermakov, who had been absent from Harvard’s lineup since last year.

Nguyen and junior Gareth Doran punished their opponents at No.2, winning 8-1 on the back of punishing service returns by Doran and fluid teamwork on serve.

At No. 3, Denenberg and Clayton overpowered and outmaneuvered their opponents to an easy 8-3 victory, keeping the Jaspers on their heels with sizzling serves and a well-executed two-man net game. In the final game, Denenberg showed the extent of his comfort by redirecting an attempted passing shot into a feeble drop-volley and crushing an overhead on match-point straight to the back wall of his opponents.

With the doubles point already in hand, Kumar and Ermakov came back from a breakdown at 2-5 to force a tiebreak at 7-7, in which they quickly fell to 5-1 before mounting a brief rally that fizzled at 4-7.

—Staff writer Jonathan B. Steinman can be reached at steinman@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION
The article above incorrectly stated that Gareth Doran played at No. 2 doubles with Dan Nguyen against Manhattan. In fact, it was Kieran Burke who paired with Nguyen against the Jaspers. The Crimson regrets the error.