ELMIRA, N.Y. -- The Elmira College men's tennis team welcomes non-conference adversary Keystone College to the Murray Athletic Center tennis domes on Monday, March 27. The opening-week match is scheduled to begin at 4:00 p.m.
LAST TIME OUT: The Soaring Eagles continued their run of red-hot play as of late, as Elmira discarded the Pacers of Marywood University by a 9-0 final score on the road in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It marked the second consecutive sweep for the Soaring Eagles, who captured 96-of-110 games played on March 23 to defeat the Pacers and level their overall record at .500 on the season.
Jordan Curtis '19 and
Stephen Gervase '20 opened the match with an 8-1 victory over Marywood's third doubles duo of Ulises Munoz Santos and Eddie Sanborn III, their first victory as a tandem at No. 3 doubles this season. In singles action,
Patrick Tracey '18 picked up an unblemished 6-0, 6-0 win at the No. 3 position, while
Yaniv Kogan '18 came out on the winning end of a 6-2, 6-0 decision, allowing the classmates to move into a three-way tie for fifth place in career singles wins with 21. Tracey's doubles partner,
Theo Tran '20, cleaned up at the top singles spot, beating Steven Price 6-3, 6-0, for his third consecutive victory at first singles.
BACK-TO-BACK: Elmira rolled the Pacers en route to its second consecutive 9-0 victory of the 2017 spring season. On March 17 at the Murray Athletic Center, EC picked up its first such win of the year against the Wildcats of the Pennsylvania College of Technology. It is the first time that the Soaring Eagles have won back-to-back matches by identical 9-0 scores since doing so against Keuka College and Utica College on March 19 and April 2 of last season.
ON A ROLL: Not only has the team won three straight matches, but Tracey and Tran have been playing superb tennis in recent weeks. As a team, they have earned four consecutive wins at the top doubles position.
SCOUTING THE GIANTS: Keystone College will be playing in its second match in as many days, as the Giants dropped their season opener on Sunday afternoon to SUNY Delhi, 9-0. Six of the nine matches finished with Keystone winning one game or fewer, including singles contests at spots three through four in which the Giants scraped together just two games. Keystone is looking to build on last year's 1-9 overall record, the most recent of four consecutive one-win seasons for the Giants. Robert Azzarelli returns to Keystone as the team's most winningest player from the 2015-16 campaign, after posting a 4-5 record at first singles during his sophomore season.
ALL-TIME SERIES: This evening's matchup between Elmira and Keystone marks just the second all-time meeting between the two non-conference adversaries. The Soaring Eagles won the only previous matchup, one that took place in the spring of 2011, by a 7-2 final score in La Plume, Pennsylvania.
LOOKING AHEAD: The Elmira men will return to the Murray Athletic Center to kick off the Empire 8 Conference portion of its schedule on Saturday, April 1, at 12:00 p.m. against the Ithaca College Bombers, last season's E8 Tournament runner-up.
