He’s still here, but not really. Sven Swinnen spends his afternoons practicing with the men’s tennis team as he works toward finishing his degree, but he effectively ended his career as a Duck last season.
Now Oregon’s most prolific tennis player is biding his time until graduation, after which he will attempt to make a name for himself on the professional tennis circuit.
Swinnen was to the men’s tennis team what current Detroit Lions quarterback Joey Harrington was to Oregon football back in 2001, when Harrington led the Ducks.
In his four years as a Duck, Swinnen completely rewrote the Oregon men’s tennis record books. Among other things, the Wurenlingen, Switzerland native brought the program its first ITA tournament title (2004 West Regional) and its highest individual player ranking ever when he entered the 2004 season ranked No. 9 nationally.
This year, the Ducks have lost Swinnen and fellow highly-rated Swiss Manuel Kost. Second-year head coach Kevin Kowalik is determined not to allow the loss of the team’s two best players to stand in the way of Oregon’s success this year.
Kowalik’s personal vision this season is for the Ducks to take their overall win-loss percentage up to at least a .500. “We’ve been tied for seventh in the Pac-10 over the last couple of years. This year I’m shooting for fifth or sixth,” Kowalik said. “That would hopefully put us within the top 30 in the country.
“It’s virtually impossible to fill Sven’s shoes with any one player,” added Kowalik, who cites a conscientious work ethic as an important building block to set in place this year. “The goal this season is to help everybody improve about 20, 25 percent, so that hopefully will help make up for losing such a big contributor. We’re going to be a blue-collar team; we’re going to go out there and outwork everybody else and be in better shape than everybody else. We have to develop, we’ve got to get better,” he said.
With five upperclassmen on the roster this year, the infrastructure of the team is still intact, so filling the gap left by Swinnen and Kost might not be as daunting as it appears.
“I think we had good leaders last year,” Oregon junior Vladimir Pino said. “It wasn’t necessarily just Sven who kept things going. We had three juniors who were very involved in leadership, and they’re all still here as seniors this year. As for the playing side of things, I think Thomas [Bieri] or Markus [Schiller] will have to step up into the number one and number two spots.”
The team’s three seniors are Bieri, Schiller and Arron Spencer. Schiller played at the No. 2 and No. 3 positions for most of last season, earning a 12-9 overall singles record, while Spencer rebounded from an injury two seasons ago to put up a 9-11 record playing in the No. 3 and No. 4 roster spots.
Bieri looks set to finally shed Swinnen’s shadow and have his own breakout season. The Switzerland native spent the summer training independently in Switzerland and France and feels as though he’s just now hitting his stride.
“I really haven’t done as well over the last two years as I would have liked,” said Bieri, who posted a 9-17 overall record in the 2004-05 season.
“But I really feel that I’ve worked hard in this offseason, and I’m working hard now too. I really feel like I’m improving every day now, and I haven’t felt that for a while, so that’s exciting,” he said.
The team started training the week before classes began. The off-season training phase includes skill and conditioning workouts and several preseason tournaments, the first of which takes place this weekend in California.
Vladimir Pino and fellow junior Eric Pickard head down to Santa Clara this weekend to play in the second annual Bronco Invitational.
“I want to play as many guys from Santa Clara as possible this weekend because we’ve had problems against them before,” Pickard said. “So I just want to get out there, play and hopefully beat them.”
Pino has higher aspirations for this weekend’s tournament.
“I want to win it,” Pino said. “If I’m healthy I think I have a good chance of winning it. I did pretty well there last year.”