Bob Larson's Tennis News | MTN: 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Tennis Championship Quarterfinals Match Results: #8 USC 4, #1 Virginia 0

NCAA Division I Tennis Championships
Men’s Quarterfinals
May 17, 2009
George P. Mitchell Tennis Center
College Station, Texas

#8 USC 4, #1 Virginia 0

RECORDS: USC 23-5; Virginia 32-1

SINGLES
1. #8 Robert Farah (USC) def. #14 Dominic Inglot (UVA), 6-3, 6-1
2. #53 Steve Johnson (USC) def. #26 Sanam Singh (UVA), 6-3, 6-4
3. #27 Michael Shabaz (UVA) vs. #81 Jaak Poldma (USC), 5-7, 6-4, 1-4 DNF
4. #106 Abdullah Magdas (USC) def. #70 Houston Barrick (UVA), 4-6, 6-2, 6-3
5. Steven Eelkman Rooda (UVA) vs. Matt Kecki (USC), 3-6, 6-6 DNF
6. #90 Lee Singer (UVA) vs. Daniel Nguyen (USC), 7-6 (5), 5-2 DNF

DOUBLES
1. #12 Inglot/Shabaz (UVA) def. #4 Farah/Johnson (USC), 8-6
2. #59 Magdas/Nguyen (USC) def. #13 Barrick/Singh (UVA), 9-8 (5)
3. Kecki/Poldma (USC) def. Courtney/Singer (UVA), 8-5

ORDER OF FINISH: Doubles: 3, 1, 2 Singles: 1, 2, 4

POSTMATCH NOTES
USC advances to the NCAA semifinals for the first time since 2004. The Trojans will face 12th-seeded Texas on Monday at 1 p.m. (CT). The last time the top seed was knocked out of the team championship in the quarterfinals was top-seeded Stanford versus eighth-seeded Tennessee in 2001 in Athens, Ga. Ironically, the last lowest seed to beat the No. 1 favorite was 11th-seeded USC in the finals against top-seeded Georgia in the 2002 Championship held in College Station. The Trojans were the first team to defeat top-seeded and undefeated Virginia this season. Both teams completed doubles play on Saturday, before a rain delay moved the quarterfinal matches to Sunday morning.

POSTMATCH QUOTES
USC Head Coach Peter Smith
“It always amazes me, at this time of year, to watch the team that you’ve spent the last nine months with and see that no matter what’s bothering them and no matter what issues they have, they just go out and give 100 percent. It’s not that I don’t normally see that. I know that they run into problems, but they just push it out of their heads and give it their all. I’m really proud of them for that. In 22 years of coaching, it (the rain delay and on Saturday) has never happened to me before. We kind of stole the doubles point yesterday, but two years ago, I felt they kind of stole the point from us in the quarters. It was pay back and I slept well last night. I’m going to sleep well during this time of year, because all of the hard work is done. All of the work that we’ve done over the last nine months – that’s done. We just have to relax and let our game speak for itself and we know what type of game we have.”

USC Senior Abdullah Magdas
“I played the same match here against A&M and on the same court (during the regular season). I was 5-1, serving for it, but we had lost the doubles match against them on 4-3, because I didn’t finish it, serving for it twice. That was obviously a little in my head. I managed to somehow pull it out at 5-3. It wasn’t easy. Houston (Barrick) was a good player and I’ve played him before in the fall. I was serving for it 5-4, five in the third and I lost in the breaker. All of these things add up, when you play these matches. Obviously, this is the most important match of the year. It’s important to me, because it could be my last match since I’m a senior, so every match I’m treating it like something special.”

Virginia Head Coach Brian Boland
“It was a long match, starting yesterday. We lost a difficult doubles point, but at the end of the day, I thought that we came in today believing we would win, whether or not we lost that doubles point. I certainly don’t believe that it was the determining factor. We just gave them a little of momentum that was taken away from them, because of the delay we had last night and being able to pick up the match this morning. I guess the loss hasn’t sunk in yet. They played really well. USC looked really sharp and they are extremely strong from top-to-bottom. Give them a lot of credit. They deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the match they played. They deserved to win today. They were the better team on the court. With that being said, we fought hard, but there were some things we needed to do better to find four points between USC today – or yesterday I should say, since it was a two-day match which is something that is new to us. We prepared well, we were well-conditioned and we left it on the court. It is just really disappointing to know that we’ve been back here now for our sixth-straight year, it never gets easier, but we’ll keep coming back.”