This recent stretch of cold weather notwithstanding, spring is in the air here on the Farm, and that means one thing for the Stanford men’s tennis team: The season is about to start. The 2011-12 Cardinal team is looking to avenge last year’s nail-biting defeat at the hands of the Virginia Cavaliers in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament, held at Stanford’s home court, the Taube Family Tennis Center.
The deciding match in that contest came down to senior Alex Clayton, one of three departing members along with classmates Ted Kelly and Greg Hirshmann. The three new freshmen represent a subtle shift for the Stanford team in that two of them are international: Gregory Zerkalov is from Moscow and John Morrissey is from Dublin. The third freshman, Robert Stineman, hails from Winnetka, Ill.
The Stanford men’s tennis team has been renowned, of late, for being one of the few top collegiate programs to recruit almost exclusively in the United States. This year’s batch of freshman shows that head tennis coach John Whitlinger seems to be bucking his personal recruiting trends and following trends of the nation’s other top programs in international recruiting.
The three new freshmen, as well as the rest of last year’s underclassmen, are likely to be thrust into action early and often this season, more so than they normally would because Bradley Klahn is out with an injury for at least the next month.
Klahn, a senior who is a former NCAA singles champion, has been the team’s No. 1 player for more than two seasons, and his absence will surely be a tough void for Whitlinger to fill early in the season.
“[The injury] gives another guy a chance to step up and play and prove himself, and that can be a really good thing,” Whitlinger said. “When you lose your No. 1 player, a guy who is an NCAA champion, it definitely creates a bit of a dilemma — but this is a deep team and in the coming matches I guess we’ll see just how deep it is. We’ve got some challenging matches coming up, but these are matches that we are really excited to be playing.”
The Cardinal starts the season ranked No. 6 in the country behind powerhouses USC, Virginia, Ohio State, Georgia and Baylor. USC is the two-time defending national champion and the Cardinal players certainly have their two dual-match meetings with the Trojans — the first on Feb. 3 at Taube, the second on April 14 in L.A.
Coach Whitlinger is happy with the No. 6 ranking, but concedes, “there is a long way to go until May.”
May is the culminating month of the college tennis season; the month that all coaches build their teams up for. May is the month of the NCAA Championship, held this year at Georgia. By May the Cardinal will assuredly have their stud, Bradley Klahn, back on the court, changing the tenor of a team that will have played for more than a month in his absence.
Until then, however, Whitlinger says his squad must strive “to get a little better every day, every match, to discover exactly what kind of team we have.”
The men’s tennis team is excited to get its dual-match season off on the right foot when it travels to Oklahoma to meet Tulsa and the University of North Carolina. The Cardinal will then return home for a seven-match home-stand beginning Jan. 27 against St. Mary’s.