With a 6-14 overall record (0-5 Pacific-10 Conference) and two weeks remaining in the regular season, the Oregon men’s shot at the postseason is all but over.
The Oregon women’s tennis team is a different story. Led by No. 30 Dominika Dieskova, the women are poised for the postseason with a No. 44 team ranking and a 12-7 overall record (3-4 Pac-10).
Both teams kicked off this season in a rebuilding phase, each having lost its standout players to graduation last year.
The departures of two-time All-American Sven Swinnen and the equally accomplished Manuel Kost left the men’s team with big shoes to fill, while the women’s team had to replace three-time Pac-10 singles champion Daria Panova – arguably the most decorated player in program history.
Both teams packed their rosters with brand new freshmen, and played most of the season with an equal ratio of freshmen to upperclassmen in the starting lineup.
Things worked out for the women, but not for the men.
Amid the similarities between both teams, there is a stark difference in team cohesion between the men’s and women’s teams.
When asked to name their best friend on the team, neither Claudia Hirt, a freshman on the women’s team, nor Monica Hoz de Vila, a junior, could single out a specific person. Instead they both agreed that the entire team was best friends.
“It’s like I’m friends with everybody,” Hirt said. “We’re a family. I can talk to everybody. We’re all very, very close.”
The freshmen on the men’s team have had a different experience.
“I don’t think the upperclassmen were gentle with us at all. Within our team, we have a lot of different groups,” freshman Fernando Freitas said. “We, the five freshmen, are pretty tight. We occasionally have dinner together and stuff like that, but it’s rare that we do much with the whole team together.”
Thomas Bieri, a senior, thinks that this lack of overall cohesion is one of the main reasons behind the team’s dismal season.
“I personally think that on our team right now, everyone splits up and just fends for themselves. It’s a superficial caring about what the other (teammate) does,” he said. “Tennis may be an individual sport, but in college tennis, it’s all about the team.”
Freitas and Hugh McDonald both say that having the team do more things together off the court would help increase on-court performance.
Junior Vlad Pino also thinks that the team needs to “just do things as a team more,” and fellow junior Eric Pickard agrees that there “have been times when we’ve been more cohesive,” though he adds that “as far as this year goes, we’re now about as far as we could have gotten.”
Bieri believes that at some point between his sophomore and junior years, the values of the team evolved, and competitiveness was nurtured at the expense of cohesion.
“During my freshman and sophomore year, I think the right objectives were being set and the right things were being emphasized,” he said. “We were shown that how the team behaved and what you did on a daily basis mattered more than results or who played in which roster spot.
“There was this mentality throughout the team that doing the right thing was more important, and would get you more respect than just getting results.”
But things are different now, and everyone acknowledges that the shift in emphasis is partly due to the change of coaching that the team underwent two seasons ago.
Kevin Kowalik, the Oregon men’s coach, replaced Chris Russell in 2004 when the latter accepted the associate head coach position with Washington’s tennis team.
Kowalik is the first to admit that the transition brought some growing pains for everyone.
“These guys (the upperclassmen) came in under a certain system, and now they’re trying to learn a new system, and now things are different,” he said. “So they’re learning to adapt just like the freshmen are learning.”
One of the contrasts between the Russell’s and Kowalik’s coaching styles is the switch in emphasis from the team aspect of college tennis to the competition itself.
“The best way I know to have people improve is competitiveness,” said Kowalik, who sometimes has his players play each other in challenge matches to compete for roster spots.
Kowalik also said he maintains a roster of nine to 10 active players despite the fact that the team only travels with eight.
“That way those guys sitting at home are going to have a huge desire to get on that travel team and if the No. 5 and No. 6 guys (in the lineup) aren’t trying to stay ahead of the ones who aren’t on the travel team, these other guys are going to pass them,” he said.
Kowalik says he can see how this practice could be bad for morale, but he believes that the only way to move forward “is to have people push each other.”
“It depends on how you choose to look at it,” he said. “You can choose to be negative, or you can choose to be positive.”
Yet, in some ways this seems to counter Kowalik’s other goal for the team – to bring in a family-like atmosphere similar to that on the women’s team.
Oregon women’s coach Nils Schyllander said he doesn’t want to make his players feel as though they have to compete with each other to move up the starting lineup.
“One thing that we really preach is that you don’t question the lineup,” Schyllander said. “Because if you do that, you’re saying that your teammate doesn’t deserve to play.
“We preach that the seventh girl is as important as the first – and she is. Because if that person brings a lot of energy from outside the court during a match, that person could be the difference in the way a close match goes.”
Trying to foster a family-like environment, Schyllander also introduced a big team-bonding initiative in the fall. The team went on a retreat to Sunriver where the members played paintball, went hiking and got to know each other better.
Having the whole team come together for bonding activities in the fall was something the men could not do this season because three of their four active freshmen joined the team in January.
“You have to give (the freshmen) a good feeling coming into things,” Schyllander said. “Then hopefully they’ll remember how they were treated as freshmen and will treat the next batch of freshmen in the same way.”Hoz de Vila, a junior, is living proof that Schyllander’s approach to coaching has worked for the Duck women.
“When I got here, the team was already like this, so you just keep the tradition going and try and help the freshmen (who come in) after you in the same way,” she said.
On the men’s team, this lack of cohesion has been hard on the freshmen. Freitas declares that next year he wants to make sure that things are different.
“I don’t want (the incoming freshmen) to feel the same things that I felt when I first got here,” he said. “In the beginning you don’t have many friends, and sometimes you just want somebody to talk to.
“I think we have to be more present for the freshmen and make ourselves more avail-able to them next year.”
At present, however, Bieri is convinced that the team’s lack of spirit was a factor that crippled the Duck men this season.
“The priority on this team is not cohesion, it’s winning. And that’s the death sentence to a team that’s losing,” he said. “I’ve never climbed out of a losing streak by thinking ‘winning is all that counts.’”
Hampered by back and wrist injuries this year, the senior watched his final season as a Duck crumble before his eyes as the men’s team found itself in a six-match losing streak that it’s still trying to snap.
“I’m very disappointed. My heart is bleeding,” Bieri said. “I’ve seen the respect that we got the first two years that I was here, how much we built the program up, and how much respect there was for the program within the Pac-10 and in the nation. And now, that’s just sort of gone down the drain.
“I think now guys just care way too much about how they do individually. In the past, I
used to win, and we’d lose as a team, and I’d be upset. But right now, that’s just not the mentality anymore.”
The men play at home against UCLA today at 1:30 p.m. and against USC at 1 p.m. on Saturday. The women are on the road to face the Bruins today and the Trojans Saturday.