Oregon men’s tennis head coach Nils Schyllander finds himself in a peculiar situation during the fall season.
Since Oregon is one of the few PAC-12 schools that run on the quarter system, Schylander is forced to play a much shorter fall schedule than most of his conference foes.
“We just can’t fit in anymore in the fall if we’re going to get proper training,” Schyllander said. “We start so late, being a quarter school, but the longer the fall school goes the better we usually get.”
Despite their schedule limitations, the Ducks have found ways to steadily improve throughout their short season and have been playing their best tennis of late.
They will play their fourth and final tournament this weekend when they head to Palo Verdes, California for the Kramer Classic on Nov. 12.
“We don’t know exactly who is going to go yet,” Schyllander said last week. “We’ll kind of decide based on injuries and things like that. But we just need to keep the progress going forward.”
Schyllander said nobody on the team is dealing with major injuries, and a few players are just resting and recovering from nagging injuries.
At Oregon’s last tournament, the Easley Memorial Tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Ducks swept both the singles and doubles titles in a tournament field the featured strong UNLV and Oklahoma State programs.
Oregon currently sits in fifth place out of eight teams in the PAC-12 standings with a 15-9 overall record and a 3-4 conference record. The PAC-12 is dominated by the four California schools, and Oregon will finally have a chance to face the top teams in the conference.
The Ducks will matchup against strong USC and UCLA programs for the first time this weekend, and they will also face Washington and Stanford for the second time this year.
The tournament will feature Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount, Cal Poly, University of California Santa Barbara and Cal Poly as well.
USC features two of the top 100 players in the nation in Nick Crystal and Max de Vroome. The Trojans are first in the PAC-12 with a 22-4 overall record and a 6-1 conference record.
The player to watch for the tournament will be Mackenzie McDonald from UCLA. McDonald, a junior, was voted the PAC-12 player of the year last season and was ranked third in the nation in the preseason ITA rankings.
The Ducks will look for strong performances from Daan Maasland, their lone ranked player and most consistent performer this season. Maasland sat out the team’s’ most recent tournament, and a handful of Oregon players stepped up in his absence.
Jayson Amos won the singles title at the Easley Memorial Tournament and also advanced to the semifinals on the doubles side. Oregon duo Bartosz Sawicki and Cormac Clissold captured the title on the doubles bracket.
“They’re both naturally pretty good doubles players; they both return well,” Schyllander said of Sawicki and Clissold. “Bart has a pretty good serve, and Cormac moves really good at the net and can pick off the middle pretty well.”
“Their style just blend really well together.”
Follow Jarrid Denney on Twitter at @jdenney50