As the Oregon men’s tennis team sits atop the tournament bubble, it must wait until the NCAA Tournament brackets are revealed Wednesday to see if the season will continue.
If it does, the team is hoping for a good NCAA Tournament draw that will keep them in the Northwest.
The 32nd-ranked Oregon women’s team looks as if it will make its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament since 2000.
“I would love to get placed in Washington,” Oregon head coach Nils Schyllander said. “We still have a bad taste in our mouth from that loss because we felt like we let it slip away in the end.”
That’s a statement with which most on the team can agree.
“We lost to them twice this year, and I think we can definitely beat them,” Courtney Nagle said.
Nagle said she has something personal to overcome from their last meeting.
“I was up in my match pretty handily and I lost, and then we lost the match 4-3,” she said.
With a 16-8 record, the Ducks have completed their most successful regular season in more than 10 years.
The NCAA singles tournament draw also will be announced later this week with 12th-ranked junior Daria Panova poised to make her second appearance in a row. Panova, Oregon’s all-time record holder for victories, looks to put her early exit of the Pacific-10 Conference Championships out of her mind.
“Hopefully, I’m going to do the opposite of what I did at Ojai (Calif.),” Panova said.
Freshman Dominika Dieskova has an outside chance of making the singles tournament. The 71st-ranked Dieskova has a 20-14 record this season, having defeated No. 11 Dianne Hollands of Arizona. Also, at one point she had 10th-ranked Alice Barnes of Stanford on the ropes until Dieskova became dehydrated and lost the match.
“She’s on the bubble,” Schyllander said. “She’s a freshman, and if she doesn’t make it, it’s not the end of the world.”

Men hope for best
The Oregon men, ranked 49th in the country, are hoping to make it to the tournament for the third time in the program’s history, but with a 9-10 record, Oregon’s tournament aspirations may be cut short.
“I feel like we should be in,” Oregon head coach Chris Russell said. “It’s going to depend how the committee interprets the data. If they interpret it the way we think it should be interpreted, we should be in, but if they interpret it another way, we’re going to have a hard time making it.”
The Ducks haven’t lost to a lower-ranked opponent all season and have upset No. 23 Washington and No. 34 Arizona State.
“I think the thing that separates us is that we don’t have a bad loss this season,” Russell said.
Oregon will have at least one player in postseason play. Junior Sven Swinnen is a lock to make his first NCAA appearance. The Switzerland native recently moved up to No. 16 in the nation, the highest any Oregon men’s player has been ranked in the program’s history.
Swinnen’s 21 victories this season also move him up to third place all-time on Oregon’s victory list with 59.
Junior Manuel Kost’s late surge may help him sneak into the tournament for the second year in a row. After winning his first eight dual matches of the season, including a victory over 10th-ranked Alex Vlaski of Washington, the 66th-ranked Kost played .500 tennis until the Pac-10 tournament. There, he advanced to the round of 16, including a win against a tough Luben Pampoulov of UCLA.
Kost’s 18-10 record is an improvement over last year’s 15-14 record, but stiff competition in the Pac-10 may overshadow the Swiss native.
“We will be disappointed if we don’t get in,” Russell said. “Everything we do is geared toward being able to play in May and we want to make that our expectation every year.”