Men’s tennis to play Furman, Charlotte outdoors
Halfway through the match against UNC Wilmington, the South Carolina men’s tennis team appeared headed to a second straight loss after a 7-0 start to the season. The doubles teams had just experienced a sweep, and most of the singles players were down against their opponents.
It was at that point the No. 48 Gamecocks turned the tide and took four straight singles matches en route to a 4-3 win against the No. 46 Seahawks.
As the Gamecocks head into their final nonconference matches of the season this weekend, head coach Josh Goffi will look for more of the same tenacity that got them to the point they are now, before conference play begins next week.
“Coming off of a tough road loss like [N.C. State], against a team we would have loved to get a win against, everyone was down during practice last week,” Goffi said. “But that also kind of fueled the fire, and everyone was anxious to get back on the court and get after it. It looked like we were about to lose again, but we turned the tide. Now they have the confidence that no matter how difficult the match or how tight the situation is, they’re always going to have the ability to find a way out of it.”
Carolina will need that mindset heading into SEC play, a conference that has three teams ranked in the top six in the country. Up first for USC, however, are Furman and Charlotte on Saturday. Goffi is expecting his team to continue to handle its business against mid-majors. In every match that his team has played an unranked opponent, it has come away with the sweep.
“We’ve had four wins against ranked teams so far this season, and three of them came on the road,” said Goffi, who has the team off to an 8-1 start. “As a coach it’s our job to go out there and take care of it ourselves and not let us overlook the opponent. It is what we did through the first four matches of the season. We went out there and all we cared about was putting a product out there that we wanted, with high energy and making sure we took care of things.”
High energy won’t be a problem Saturday as the team finally gets to play in the new Carolina Tennis Center, something Goffi said they have been waiting on for a while.
“We’re ecstatic,” Goffi said. “We can’t wait; we’re just praying for good weather. It’s a doubleheader, so we can’t exactly plan to play at 1 p.m. when the weather’s perfect, but we’re going to do whatever we can to play out there. The guys are out there practicing every day, just waiting to compete.”
As for the sweep of the doubles team in Wilmington, Goffi attributes some of that to the loss of sophomore Nick Jones to injury, and says he will continue to tweak the lineup.
“If not for the injury, we would have kept our teams the way they were,” Goffi said. “We just had to slide somebody else in and move a couple teams up. Right now, we’re trying to figure out the teams before we get into SEC play and put out the best combos that complement each other, and hopefully we’ll show up at the right spots.”