The Creighton men’s tennis team looks to rebound after a 7-0 loss to Southern Illinois Univeristy Friday at the Salukis’ University Courts.
The Jays (7-8, 0-3 MVC) failed to claim a point against a hot SIU (12-3, 3-0 MVC) team that now sits in second place in the Missouri Valley Conference standings.
The defeat is Creighton’s fourth in their last five contests and drops the Jays to the very bottom of the MVC.
Creighton struggled out of the gate in doubles play and couldn’t seem to find their rhythm.
“It started off real poorly,” head coach Tom Lilly said. “We played about as bad in doubles as I thought we could.”
Senior Ryan Norman and freshman Nick Thompson lost to Brandon Florez and Martijn Admiraal, senior Sean Mathison and freshman Brandon Lee lost to Badr Cherradi and Jonny Rigby and freshman August Nysted and sophomore Elliott Baker dropped their match against Jorge Cavero and Szymon Opieczonek.
SIU took all three opening matches with 8-1 victories.
Singles play saw a similar amount of success, or lack thereof, for the Jays. Mathison and Norman put forth solid efforts, but Creighton couldn’t pull out a victory in any of the six matches.
“You could kind of tell that the ride was still in our legs ‘cause we weren’t moving too well, so coach made us run after doubles.” Dippel said. “That got us started off a little better in singles.”
Court No. 1 saw a good battle between Mathison and Flores that ended in an SIU win (6-4, 6-3).
Norman went to extra games in his first set, but couldn’t finish the effort against Cavero in Court No.2. SIU took the victory with a (7-5, 6-1) win.
The Salukis finished the sweep with convincing victories over Baker and the freshman trio of Dippel, Lee and Anthony Rauschenbach.
“I thought we competed a lot better in singles,” Lilly said.
The Jays will look to finish the year strong as they return to Omaha for their final home matches of the season over the weekend. They take on Bradley Saturday and Illinois State Sunday at Hanscom Tennis Center.
“They’re both good teams, but they’re beatable,” Lilly said. “I think we’ll have a lot of fight in us this weekend and then going into our conference tournament.”