Cal Heads North To End Regular Season

After this weekend, Ryder Jackson and the Bears play in the Pac-12 Championship.

MTEN4/19/2023 8:33 PM | By: Cal Athletics

BERKELEY – With seeding in the upcoming Pac-12 Championship on the line, the 28th-ranked California men’s tennis team travels to the Pacific Northwest this week to conclude the regular season. The Golden Bears (11-8, 3-3 Pac-12) face 55th-ranked Oregon (12-11, 1-5) on Friday at 1:30 p.m. PDT at the Student Tennis Center and take on 56th-ranked Washington (10-10, 1-5) on Sunday at noon. The match in Seattle will take place either outdoors at the Quillian Tennis Stadium or indoors at the Nordstrom Tennis Center.
 
Cal is currently in fifth place in the Pac-12 Conference standings and could finish as high as third place by the end of the weekend.
 
Click here for live scores for Cal-Oregon, and click here for the live stream and live scores page for the match in Seattle. Fans can also keep track of the Bears on Twitter @CalMensTennis.
 
Poll Position
Cal sits at No. 28 in this week’s ITA rankings. Yuta Kikuchi (14-7) is ranked 30th in singles. The duo of Ryder Jackson and Lucas Magnaudet (14-4) is ranked 73 in doubles and the tandem of Kikuchi and Carl Emil Overbeck (4-0) is ranked 88th.
 
Cal Falls In Big Slam
Then-No. 29 Cal took a 3-2 lead over 20th-ranked Stanford in Saturday’s Big Slam on The Farm, but the Bears lost the last two singles matches to fall to the Cardinal, 4-3.
 
Kikuchi Named Pac-12 Player of the Week
Cal star Yuta Kikuchi was named the Pac-12 Player of the Week on April 11, after the graduate student led the then-No. 43 Bears to conference victories over No. 28 UCLA and No. 10 USC in the last regular-season home matches of his career.
 
That marked the second Pac-12 Player of the Week accolade for Kikuchi, who first garnered the honor in the spring of 2022.
 
Against the Bruins on April 7, Kikuchi defeated Patrick Zahraj, 6-4, 6-2, at court-one singles to clinch Cal’s 4-0 win. Kikuchi also partnered with senior Philip Hjorth to clinch the doubles point with a 7-5 win over UCLA’s Jeffrey Fradkin and Aadarsh Tripathi on court three.
 
On April 8, in possibly his last match as a collegian at the Hellman Tennis Complex, Kikuchi beat USC’s 35th-ranked Stefan Dostanic, 6-3, 6-1, for his fifth consecutive singles win….