Biggest win in program history?  Who knows, but it sure felt like it in the moment!  In a battle of two nationally ranked programs on Sunday morning, the fireworks were flying as the #21 UW-Whitewater Warhawk Men’s Tennis team took on the #11 University of Chicago.

The energy level was through the roof for this one the entire match as the teams battled back and forth.  The table was set for the upset when the Warhawks swept the doubles to take a 3-0 lead going into singles.  In doubles, each Warhawk pair took early leads and in the middle of the prosets, the Hawks were up two breaks at #1 and up single break at #2 and #3.  That’s when the momentum shifted as the Maroons broke back at each of the three spots to tighten up the match.  Nearing the end of each match, the Hawks did what they needed to do and broke at each position in the final game for wins of 8-4, 8-6, and 8-6.

This obviously gave the Hawks a huge boost going into singles.  We now needed two singles matches to win the match. Balkin and McGlashen looked early to be our best chances as they were each playing incredibly out of the gates.  McGlashen was up 6-2, 3-0 on Golovin when the strings on his last racket broke.  Bickett quickly kicked out an emergency string job, but in the time it took to restring, Andy lost 3 of the 4 games and had lost his big lead.  Golovin was back in the match.  Balkin’s opponent also climbed back into the match and was heading into a second set tiebreak in hopes of leveling that match. 

That’s when we looked to the other courts to see if we could get any possible comebacks there, as each of the other courts had lost first sets.  In fact, Bayliss and Brian Klein each had recovered from first set blow outs and were looking to win tight second sets.  At this time Scanlan and Osborne had lost, so we were only leading 3-2 in the team match, still looking for two more points.  Klein started cruising in his 3^rd set and was up 3-0, when his opponent got a game misconduct penalty from his coach making it 4-0, followed by a default.  So now we were up 4-2.  Byron had 3 match points during his marathon tiebreak, but Brinker pulled it out 13-11 to send that match to a third set.  McGlashen was down a break in his third set, and Bayliss grabbed the momentum going into his third set by winning his second set tiebreak!  Bayliss proved to be the hero as he used that momentum to get up early and stay up with incredible pl! ay at #2.  He won 6-4 in the third set to give the Hawks the team win! (McGlashen had lost in 3 and Balkin was still battling in 3).  Balkin ended up losing a great match for a final team score of 5-4.

Go to assistant coach Bickett’s Blog at The Bickett Zone for his take on this thrilling match.  He also has photos, videos, and the match summaries of our other two matches this weekend. 

On Friday the men hosted Augustana and took a 9-0 win.  The highlight of this match was at #3 where RJ Rademacher and Cam Laktash played amazing tennis to wipe out a 2 break deficit and win 9-8!  Against D-1 UW Green Bay, we got beat 7-0, but pushed the Phoenix at several spots against very talent players.  Erik Scanlan and Kevin Friend continued their strong play winning at #3 doubles against Green Bay, while Mitch Osborne and Andy McGlashen were able to push their opponents  to third sets before losing in match tiebreaks.  For all individual scores from the weekend, go to: UWW Scores vs GB and U Chicago and UWW Scores vs Augustana College

This weekend the fun continues as UWW travels to Kalamazoo to take on Kzoo and Monmouth.  Last year the Warhawks took down Kzoo 5-4 in great match, so I’m sure that will be another battle.  The Hawks Play Kzoo at 10am on Saturday followed by Monmouth at 2pm.  I'm also looking forward to next week, when the women's team starts practicing with the coaching staff.  Their first spring dual match will be against D-1 U of Milwaukee on March 9th at 4pm at LeClub in Milwaukee.

GO WARHAWKS!!!