Men's Tennis Notches Upsets at ITA Regionals

After three grueling hours, 28 back-and-forth games with no resolution, and a third set tiebreak, Harvard men’s tennis freshman Kenny Tao finally hit a shot that Princeton senior and number one player Zach McCourt could not return. The spectators and Tao’s teammates went wild as they celebrated the huge second-round upset.

“It’s very promising to see one of the freshmen do that well against a senior, another Ivy opponent,” co-captain Alex Steinroeder said.

Upsets like that characterized the Crimson’s run at the International Tennis Association Northeast Regional Championships, hosted by St. John’s.

Harvard coach Dave Fish ’72 was also impressed by the play of his team’s young guns.

“I think we had some wonderful performances by freshman Grant Solomon, who played the No. 1 seed in the opening round match,” Fish said. “Sebastian Beltrame, a sophomore, beat a guy that played in the top team for Columbia.”

The Crimson wrapped up a long weekend in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., where the team competed against the top players from around the Northeast in one of the first tournaments of the year.

“This is as strong an Ivy League as we’ve ever seen in all my years,” Fish said. “The quality of play was extraordinarily high. We had a bunch of guys who got out a little earlier than we had hoped, but I’m not really concerned because it was a splash of cold water that I think they will respond to…. Overall, I feel like we can do better, and I think the team feels that way too.”

Three of the team members made it past the round of 32 in the singles competition. Steinroeder posted definitive wins against top opponents—including No. 1 seeded Tyler Lu from Yale, Andres Alban from NJIT, and Victor Pugliese from Monmouth—before falling to Columbia’s Winston Lin in straight sets, 6-2, 7-6, in the quarterfinals.

Similarly, Beltrame bested Ivan Kravtchenko from Brown and Robin Lesage from Binghamton before Dovydas Sakinis from Dartmouth got the better of him in two sets, 6-4, 6-2.

Tao, after his upset of McCourt, went on to defeat a player from the Bears before losing in the round of 16.

“It was a good dose of reality for us, because we’ve been training really well and enthusiasm has been really high,” Fish said. “Until you get in against your other regional opponents, you really don’t know how high the bar is.”

The doubles teams enjoyed more success. Beltrame and his partner, Solomon, made it to the round of 16 after two unusually long matches of 13 and 11 games against teams from UConn and Binghamton, respectively.

Steinroeder and sophomore Andrew Ball advanced to the round of 32 following wins against teams from Bryant and Dartmouth.

Co-captain Denis Nguyen and sophomore Brian Yeung, fresh off a close win against Cornell’s Chris Vrabel and Bernardo Casares Rosa in the morning, went on to take home the doubles championship after battling it out with the Big Green’s Sakinis and Chris Kipouras.

“They played exceptionally well against Dartmouth’s team in a match tiebreaker in the third set this morning,” Fish said.

Harvard will be going to the national championships in three weeks. In the meantime, the team can take encouragement from the results of the past few days.

“There’s a long season to go,” Steinroeder said. “So I think there were pretty promising results overall from the freshmen and the upperclassmen.”

From here, the team looks ahead to its upcoming tournament, the UTR Metro Open in Cambridge on Halloween weekend. Having played a trio of tournaments in the past three weeks, the team will welcome the short break.

“We have a couple weeks off now for people to get healed up and rest a little bit,” Steinroeder said. “We have one or two more fall tournaments, so I think people just need to keep working on their game and keep working on playing aggressively.”