After four consecutive matches on the road where they went 1-3, the men’s tennis team is glad to come back home and hopes that the familiar courts will bring it much-needed success.
The Warriors will play here today at 2 p.m. against conference leader Marymount and will finish the season Tuesday where they will face Cerritos, the worst team in the conference.
Marymount is still undefeated in league and will be the toughest team EC will face all year, but the players know that they have a chance at an upset if they play their best game of the year.
“Marymount is really tough because they don’t have any weak spots,” Khoi Phan said. “If we play our best and stay mentally tough, we can pull out the win.”
EC will have to regroup before playing Marymount because the team received a surprising 7-2 defeat to Long Beach City on Tuesday.
“Long Beach City played exceptionally well and it caught us by surprise,” coach Steve Van Kanegan said. “They seemed to improve over the season and became a pretty good team.”
The Warriors’ record fell to 2-6-1(1-4-1) after the loss to Long Beach City. The team still has two more matches in the season and a date to be determined to complete a tie with Long Beach City from an earlier match in the season, which might get EC a .500 record in the conference if it can win the rest of the games.
“Long Beach improved its one, two and three players and played more aggressively on doubles,” Phan said, “We played like zombies in our single matches.”
Van Kanegan said that the tie with Long Beach City will probably be completed “some time after the season” since there is a three-week break from the end of the season to the start of the Ojai Tournament.
The Ojai Tournament is an annual tennis tournament that invites college teams from all over California to have friendly matches against each other.
The 104th Ojai Tournament will be held April 22-25.
“Ojai is a great experience for the players,” Van Kanegan said, “We weren’t going to go, but since we had a lack of games this year we changed our minds.”
The South Coast Conference Tournament begins April 29 and ends May 1.
This is followed by the Southern California regionals May 6-8, and the top eight players on singles and doubles teams will face Northern California’s top eight in the state championship which starts May 13 and ends May 15.
“Players are randomly picked and paired for the tournaments by the conference coaches,” Van Kanegan said.
With the season coming to an end, Van Kanegan still like the continuing improvement he’s seeing from his players and is he’s confident they can finish the season strong.
“They are the most improved team I ever had from the beginning of the season to the end,” Van Kanegan said.
