No love: Tennis season ends on low note with loss

The match against UCLA was cancelled due to rain last Tuesday. The Toreros men's tennis team could not help but think that their season could end just as abruptly as that storm rolled in. If their play did not improve in the WCC tournament, USD tennis would put their entire season in the hands of the NCAA at-large selection committee.
Winning the WCC tournament would have earned the Toreros an automatic bid to the NCAA tennis championships, but just as the sun peaked from behind the clouds and hope for the automatic bid was looming, lightning struck and terminated any reassurance the Toreros would have of entering the post season with a reserved spot. Any hopes of a run at the NCAA team tennis championships are now hanging by a very thin thread.
As the third seed in the WCC tournament, the Toreros began their run towards the conference title against the sixth seeded Portland Pilots last Friday with much needed intensity.
"We played very solidly and with a sense of urgency against Portland," head coach Brett Masi said.
This sense of urgency was evident in the doubles matches. Junior Casey Powers and freshman Thibaut Visy set the tone with an 8-3 victory in the first doubles match of the day.  The veteran duo of juniors Dean Jackson and Nils Schive then closed out their doubles competition 8-6, giving the Toreros a considerable advantage heading into singles play.
"Our doubles was solid from all two courts," Masi said. "More than it has been in quite some time."
The Toreros would go on to capture singles victories from the ITA's 94th ranked singles player sophomore Nikola Bubnic, junior Abdullah Hashem and Visy. These victories gave the Toreros a 4-0 win over the Pilots.
  USD hoped that their superb play against the Pilots would calm the storm for good, giving hope to an otherwise inconsistent season. But it would only serve as the calm before the storm that would eventually end USD's journey to the top of the WCC.
The second seeded Santa Clara Broncos ended any type of hope the Toreros had for locking up an automatic bid in the NCAA tournament. The Broncos came away with a 4-1 victory over the Toreros in the semifinals of the conference tournament.
USD could not garner any doubles points against the Broncos, thus deterring their momentum for singles play. Jackson bounced back from this doubles defeat to take his singles match, but he would be the only one to do so for the Toreros.
"Against Santa Clara we didn't have that same sense of urgency from the start and didn't impose ourselves the way we did against Portland," Masi said. "We had plenty of opportunities but didn't capitalize, and you need to in matches like these."
The Toreros did capitalize on their opportunity in the WCC consolation match for third place, as they defeated the San Francisco Dons last Sunday by a score of 4-2. USD lived up to its third seed and finished with this respectable victory to end the WCC tournament.
The Toreros took the doubles point against the Dons but dropped the first two singles matches, putting themselves in a 2-1 hole. But Bubnic, Jackson and Visy were all victorious in the last three singles matches, sealing the Torero victory and earning a third place finish in the WCC.
USD finished the dual-match season with a 12-9 overall record, including an impressive 17-3 singles record from Visy. Visy has an outside chance in competing in the NCAA singles championships, just as the Toreros have an outside chance at getting an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament.
The storm that is the Toreros' season is still looming, but if USD manages to receive an at-large bid into the tournament, the clouds will scatter and sunshine will persevere.