Southern Illinoise University Athletics
Southern Illinois University
Eastern Illinois
Men's Tennis defeats Eastern Illinois, 5-2
04/06/2011 | 12:00:00 | Men's Tennis
April 6, 2011
By Tyler Wooten
SIUSalukis.com
CARBONDALE, Ill. -- The Southern Illinois Men's Tennis team bounced back from a loss to Vincennes last week by beating the Panthers of Eastern Illinois, 5-2, Wednesday at Sports Blast in the last match before conference play.
Leading the way for the Salukis (7-4) was freshman Adam Fabik, who at number one singles defeated EIU's Michael Sperry 6-1, 6-3. This improved Fabik to 10-1 in singles for the dual-match season and 28-4 for the entire season, which now ranks as the second highest win total in SIU history, passing Mickey Maule's 1990 mark of 27 and still trailing Maule's all-time mark of 38, set in 1988.
Also notching singles wins for SIU were sophomores Brandon Florez (6-2, 6-2) and Orhan Spahic (6-3, 6-4) and freshman Jorge Cavero (6-2, 6-4), who improved to 9-2 on the dual-match season, which is second only to Fabik on the team.
The two match points for the Panthers (3-14) came in two hotly contested singles matches with freshmen Carlos Do Val (3-6, 5-7) and Rafael Cuadrillero (6-2, 3-6, 8-10). At one point in his match, Do Val was down by three games to EIU's Kevin Bauman, to which he responded by winning five straight games until he succumbed to Bauman in the end, 5-7.
Southern Illinois swept the doubles point with wins by Fabik/Florez (8-1), Cavero/Do Val (8-4) and the sophomore pair of Spahic and Jordan Snyder (8-6).
"We're playing very good right now," said sophomore Orhan Spahic. "We're more relaxed and comfortable."
"I think we've been playing with a better attitude," said freshman Adam Fabik. "Even in the two matches we lost today our guys were fighting hard and it was close."
"We had a decent week of practice and we learned a lot from the Vincennes match," said head coach Dann Nelson. "This was a match where we needed to take care of business."
"We tried a lot harder this time," Nelson said. "I felt like we all showed up as a team, whereas against Vincennes I didn't feel like that was the case, so I think we may have fixed some of those things that we needed to fix, and that's great going into conference."
The Salukis begin their Missouri Valley Conference schedule at Wichita State on Saturday with play beginning at 1 p.m.
Players Mentioned
