It was a wild and crazy Thursday with it taking 6+ hours to complete the opening matches due to a series of rain/lightning delays. Both the Oklahoma/UCLA and Georgia/Texas matches started outdoors and were finished indoors due to 3 rain delays and lastly a lightning delay.

Before I go through the matches I wanted to thank you guys on twitter for Periscoping some of the key points in the indoor matches where there wasn’t streaming video available.  Big shout out to Jeff McMillan and Drew Mastin who both did a great job letting me and many others follow the end of the Oklahoma/UCLA and Georgia/Texas matches. Jeff also had footage of many of the key moments in the Virginia/Columbia match as well. They say a picture is worth a thousand words – well if that’s the case then a video is worth a million words. It’s so much better to be able to watch and experience these matches on some kind of video because words can only tell you so much.  Thanks again guys!!

The unpredictable Oklahoma doubles pairings surprised many of us by taking the doubles point with ease over UCLA.  Both Harris/Ghilea and Webb/Papa won 8-4 at #1 and #2 doubles.

In singles play Oklahoma raced out to a 3-0 lead after Alex Ghilea and Spencer Papa won by identical 6-3, 6-4 score at #4 and #5 singles and it looked like Florin Bragusi was going to potentially make it 4-0 when he led Joseph DiGiulio 6-3, 5-5 at #4.  However DiGiulio would hold for 6-5 then break Bragusi to send it to a 3rd set.

Mackenzie McDonald would put UCLA on the board when he handed Axel Alvarez his first dual-match loss of the year with a 6-4, 6-4 win at #1. Alvarez jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the 2nd before McDonald won 6 of the next 7 games to close the match out.

Martin Redlicki had just broken Dane Webb to go up 3-2 in the 3rd at #3 singles when play would be stopped by a lightning delay and with this being the 4th delay the decision was made to move all remaining matches indoors.

Scores before suspension of play #GoBruins #NCAAMWT pic.twitter.com/gZxTvJ91Ig

UCLA Men’s Tennis (@uclatennis) May 14, 2015

Once indoors Redlicki held onto the break lead and finished off Webb 6-7, 6-2, 6-4 to trim the Oklahoma lead to 3-2.

After taking the 1st set in a tiebreak, UCLA’s Dennis Mkrtchian would break Andrew Harris to go up 5-4 in the 2nd but Harris would break back and eventually push the match to a tiebreak. Mkrtchian would control the 2nd set tiebreak just like he did the first and would close it out for a 7-6(5), 7-6(3) win to knot the match at 3.

In the deciding match OU’s Mr. Clutch Florin Bragusi would go up 4-2 in the 3rd and would end up serving out the match at love to take the match clinching 6-3, 5-7, 6-4 win to send Oklahoma on to the Quarterfinals.

FYI, I embedded a video that has UGA/Texas highlights that starts to auto-play when this page is opened so if you hear sound that’s where it’s coming from. Can’t see to figure out how to keep it from automatically playing. (if there are any readers that are fairly tech savvy send me a message and let me know how you can embed a URL without it automatically starting)

FYI, the number beside the player’s school is the player’s Universal Tennis Rating as of May 15th.  For more details about UTR check out their website. 

[1] Oklahoma def. [16] UCLA 4-3

Doubles Competition