Men's tennis falls to Kentucky

No. 56 IU fell 6-1 in Lexington against No. 8 Kentucky on Tuesday.

The loss drops the Hoosiers to 0-1 for the spring season while the Wildcats improved to 4-0 on the season.

The only Hoosier to record a singles victory for IU was sophomore Daniel Bednarczyk.
 
Bednarczyk also recorded a victory in his doubles match with fellow sophomore Sam Monette.

Monette however failed to replicate Bednarczyk’s performance in his singles match.

“Dan played a pretty good match and I think he stepped up in the third set and did well,” IU Coach Randy Bloemendaal said.

“Sam was in the same situation and he did the opposite. He had an opportunity to really step up. He should have won.”

Bloemendaal said there may have been other factors affecting Monette’s performance against the Wildcats.

“The team went down and Sam didn’t handle it as well as he should have,” Bloemendaal said. “There’s some other things going on with Sam going into this situation and he wasn’t as prepared as he should be.”

Despite Bednarczyk’s and Monette’s doubles victory, the Hoosiers failed to pick up the doubles point as they lost the other two matches.

Bloemendaal said he felt this may have had an effect on the rest of the match.

“In tennis if you end up losing a tight doubles point you end up getting rolled pretty quick in the first set of the singles,” Bloemendaal said.

Bloemendaal said that it came down to a few players not playing well.

“We had a couple guys hang in there and do really well, and we had a couple guys that didn’t,” Bloemendaal said.

The two that didn’t were senior Dimitrije Tasic and junior Sven Lalic, who both lost in straight sets. Bloemendaal said he believed these two needed to lead the charge out of the doubles loss.

“I didn’t think Sven did a good job all day long which was disappointing because he’s much better than that,” Bloemendaal said. “In both doubles and singles I thought he could have done a lot better. He didn’t handle the situation very well.”
Bloemendaal also said multiple times that this loss came down to factors that did not concern tennis.

“Even though their team is ranked high, our tennis was good enough today,” Bloemendaal said.

“There were some lopsided scores but it wasn’t about the tennis. We were capable of playing with those guys and beating them. We had a couple of things go against us that happen on the road and we weren’t resilient enough.”

Bloemendaal referenced some officiating decisions which did not go their way, a new scoring format and Kentucky’s arena having just four courts rather than the traditional six.

“Overall, every situation you throw at me and you say ‘Hey, what about this adversity?’ I thought we underachieved with the way we handled that,” Bloemendaal said.

“We’re capable of handling those situations much better. We were prepared to handle it and then we got out there and things were a little bit tougher than we were ready for.”

The Hoosiers are in action again Friday as they travel to Charlottesville, Va. where they will play Samford.

Follow reporter Michael Hughes on Twitter @MichaelHughes94.