For the fourth season in a row, Arizona got to host the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament and for the fourth straight time it will be playing in the Sweet 16. But instead of having to plan a road trip for the next round, the Wildcats will be staying in Tucson.<\/p>\n
No. 8 seed Arizona beat Clemson 4-2 on Saturday afternoon in the second round at the LaNelle Robson Tennis Center, advancing to the second weekend for the fifth time in school history, and as a top-8 seed will host the Super Regional for the first time. The Wildcats (23-4) will face either No. 9 Oklahoma or USC next Friday or Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo play the Super Regional here\u2014we\u2019ve had to go on the road (four) times\u2014and we\u2019ve lost heartbreakers. 4-3, 4-2, and we\u2019ve been this close,\u201d UA coach Clancy Shields said. \u201cAnd to be able to do it on our home courts. I hope we can have the same crowd that we had. I mean, the energy was awesome, the band, everything. And so I\u2019m just excited for next week. I want to celebrate this with the guys. We\u2019re going to clean up some things, and let\u2019s see if we can go punch our ticket to (the quarterfinals in) Athens. It\u2019s been our goal the whole year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike previous three years, when Arizona swept its first and second round matches, Clemson (17-13) was a much tougher out. The Wildcats took the doubles point but dropped a couple first sets in singles after all single-set victories in Friday\u2019s first round 4-0 win over NAU.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Clemson team, they\u2019re crazy strong,\u201d said senior Jay Friend, who won 7-5, 6-2 at No. 1 singles. \u201cIt came down to the wire, and my heart just went a million miles an hour. But I\u2019m so proud of the guys for getting it done today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arizona was down or even early in all six singles matches, but the tide started to turn when Friend broke Clemson\u2019s Viktor Markov at 5-5 in the first set. Around the same time, sophomore Zoran Ludoski rallied from down 4-1 to take the first set 7-5 at No. 4 and then sophomore Matthias Uwe Kask bounced back from a break to win a first-set tiebreaker at No. 6.<\/p>\n
Kask, who was pressed into duty this weekend when Gilb Sekachov fell ill, then won his second set 6-0 to put the Wildcats up 3-2.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s been as consistent as anybody on our team, we\u2019ve just had such a good depth on our squad, he just hasn\u2019t had opportunities,\u201d Shields said of Kask. \u201cBut everyone on our team knows how good he is. He comes out and beats them in practice every day. We have nine guys that can all beat each other, can beat Jay on any given day in practice. And so when one guy went down with a sickness, we just said, all right, next guy up and just happy for him, because all that work that he\u2019s been putting in, some people would just check out in February when they\u2019re like, oh, I\u2019m not playing. But no, he just doubled down and got better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Freshman Alejando Arcilo had a chance to end the match at No. 5 but lost the second set, which then led fans to surround Ludoski as he was serving up 6-5 for the match.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw the crowd, people, everyone coming here,\u201d Ludoski said. \u201cSo I had it in my mind, I knew that I have to close that match to finish, to bring that fourth point for the boys, for the team, and I just trusted my game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ludoski was up 40-15 before getting overruled on an out call, then losing another point to force deuce. He then ended the match with an ace against Clemson\u2019s Henrik Bladelius.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole game I didn\u2019t make one first serve and my coach told me to toss it a little bit higher to find momentum,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the fourth season in a row, Arizona got to host the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[114935,99,428],"class_list":["post-620437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-arizona-wildcats-the-other-sports","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}