SEATTLE – For the first time since 2007, the Husky men’s tennis team fought off the Cardinal. Washington (11-10, 2-5 Pac-12) upset 17th-ranked Stanford (13-8, 4-3 Pac-12) by a 4-1 count today at the Nordstrom Tennis Center, getting their biggest win of the season in the second-to-last match of the regular season.
Washington got the key doubles point in a decisive tiebreak to take the 1-0 lead, then took four of the six first sets in singles to keep the momentum going. Then Brett Pearson and Jim Hendrikx closed out their singles victories to push the lead to 3-0. The clincher came at No. 2 singles where Cesar Bouchelaghem rebounded from his first and to date only singles loss of the season, as he got the highest-ranked win of his career, beating 12th-ranked Nishesh Basavareddy, 7-6 (1), 6-3.
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For the first time since 2007, the Dawgs take down the Cardinal!!#GoHuskies pic.twitter.com/z6zRb8VF39
— Washington Men’s Tennis (@UW_MTennis) April 22, 2023
It was a heck of a way to snap a six-match losing skid for the Huskies, during which time Head Coach Rahim Esmail said the Huskies had to keep working to get better each and every day and be ready when the opportunities came.
“The guys fought and we’ve kept fighting and believing in ourselves,” said Esmail. “Any season you have ups and downs and when you have opportunities you hope you can take advantage of them. At the start of the season I thought we did a great job of believing in what we’re building, and we hit a patch where we were tested on the road against really tough teams, and we had opportunities that didn’t go our way. The important thing we focused on was to get better every day. We put ourselves in a position today because of the way we fought.”
Esmail credited the full team effort today that also saw Dzianis Zharyn and Nedim Suko battling into third sets when the match was halted. Suko was actually two points from ending things earlier, as he led at No. 4 singles, 6-4, 5-4 and was at 30-30 on the serve of Stanford’s Aryan Chaudhary, but the Cardinal held serve and then won the next two games to take things to a third set before Bouchelaghem clinched on the adjacent court.
Hendrikx makes it 3-0 Dawgs with a 6-4, 6-1 win on 5??
Keep pushing, Dawgs!!#GoHuskies pic.twitter.com/PISHtl6jQ6
— Washington Men’s Tennis (@UW_MTennis) April 22, 2023
Zharyn bounced back from a tiebreak first set loss to win his second set, 6-3, and he broke serve to go up…
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