The Texas men’s tennis program beat Ohio State to become the last team standing Tuesday at the ITA National Indoor Championships in Dallas.
This is the first ITA title for Texas, which was this tournament’s runner-up in 2023. In its 4-2 win over the Buckeyes, Texas won the doubles point before Sebastian Gorzny, Kalin Ivanovski and Lucas Marionneau all won their singles matches.
“Anytime it’s a first National Championship, it’s an amazing benchmark for the program,” head coach Bruce Berque said in a press release. “Most importantly, I’m super happy for the guys because they earned it. It was a pretty cool thing because they really stepped up and decided they wanted to make the standards even higher than they were.”
Will Texas add this tennis team to its list of national champions? Probably not. Of the 68 national championships that Texas currently claims, 64 are NCAA titles. The four exceptions are Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women trophies that were won by UT in the early-1980s.
For men’s tennis, the ITA National Indoor Championships is not an NCAA championship event. The NCAA will crown its champion in May (the Texas men’s tennis team won an NCAA title in 2019).
But that doesn’t mean that Tuesday wasn’t triumphant for Texas. The Intercollegiate Tennis Association describes itself as “the governing body of college tennis, overseeing men’s and women’s varsity tennis at all levels — NCAA Divisions I, II and III, NAIA and Junior/Community College.” And in order to win a title, Texas had to beat Texas A&M, TCU, Baylor and Ohio State over a five-day span.
Will this indoor feat serve as a preview as to what’s to come this spring when the tennis teams head outside? The NCAA and ITA championships have been won by the same men’s team on three occasions during the past decade (Wake Forest in 2018 and 2025 and Virginia in 2017).