In his 11th year with Oregon men’s tennis, head coach Nils Schyllander has won his 200th career match.
In the first match of a three in as many days, the Ducks downed Fresno State in a “clinch-clinch” format in singles after sweeping the three doubles matches. With the clinch format, Oregon only had to win three singles matches to clinch victory. The Ducks did just that for a 4-0 win in Schyllander’s milestone day.
“Obviously I’m proud of it and I’m proud of all 200 coming at the University of Oregon,” Schyllander said. “Also I’ve been blessed to work with a great coach in coach Jonas [Piibor] and we’ve been able to recruit great student athletes.”
Jayson Amos and Armando Soemarno clinched the first of the doubles match with a dominant 6-0 defeat of Mantas Bugailiskis and Xander Veys. Cormac Clissold and Thomas Laurent had an early break in their doubles match and held the break to win 6-4 without losing a point in the final game of the match. Simon Stevens and Akihiro Tanaka won their doubles match convincingly 6-1 to earn the 1-0 lead.
“I think it was very important [to win the doubles point],” Schyllander said. “It’s a lot more of an uphill battle for Fresno State [to] come into our courts. And then losing the doubles I think the mountain just got a lot steeper for them.”
Heading into the singles match ups, Oregon only needed to win three matches to take the overall match.
Once again, it was Laurent who dominated on court No. 1. The No. 38-ranked singles player in the nation played a near flawless first set to win 6-0 but had a battle in the second set as the Frenchman struggled to win a break point.
“I think he just lost focus a little bit,” Schyllander said of Laurent. “He was rolling pretty quick everywhere. They started letting up a little bit. It’s pretty natural.”
Laurent found a break point at 3-2 but at 4-3 faced a double break point. He managed to escape in style as Laurent sent the game to deuce with a gorgeous lob for 6-4 win.
Cormac Clissold made quick work of Fresno State’s Youssef Hassan on court No. 5 as the Australian downed his opponent 6-1 6-2.
“I was trying to get it done for [coach Shyllander],” Clissold said. “That’s a huge achievement for him and I’m stoked to be a part of it.”
Looking ahead, the Ducks take on Nebraska on Friday and Iowa on Saturday.
“Every match is a battle,” Schyllander said. “Of course we play to win the game but Nebraska is a good team, we’ve seen them two years in a row and Iowa are a really good team so we’re going to have to play our best in order to get it done.”
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