SOUTH BEND, Ind. – In the opening act of the doubleheader today, the University of Notre Dame men’s tennis team dug deep to come out with a very hard fought 5-2 match against the Wisconsin Badgers. As they have been doing, Sebastian Dominko and Connor Fu came out and dominated their opponents at #1 doubles with a 6-2 win, their sixth-straight victory at the top spot. But the Irish would lose the other two doubles matches and find themselves down 1-0 headed into singles.
Dominko would get down 2-0 to start his singles match at #1 but then it was all in favor of the Irish freshman as he would 12 of the next 14 games to win 6-4, 6-1 and quickly tie up the overall match score. Jameson Corsillo would extend the second set after losing the first but ultimately lose 6-2, 7-5 at #6. But the remaining 4 other matches would all go the distance and need third sets to determine the match winners and the overall team victory.
Junior Jean-Marc Malkowski saw his first action of the year and made a statement in his return. He would find himself on the #2 singles court and won the opening set 6-3. After dropping the second set, he raced out to an early lead in the third and never looked back securing a 6-0 third set victory. Yu Zhang would also win the first set and drop the second. In the third, the two players would trade holding serve the first 7 games of the set before Zhang broke at love to give himself the 5-3 lead and a chance to serve it out. After jumping out to a 40-0 lead, it wouldn’t be until his fourth match point that he would hold at deuce to put the Irish ahead 3-1.
With his back against the wall, Fu was down a set and a break at #3 singles. But the senior battled back and took the second in a tiebreak before running away with a decisive 6-1 final set and secure the team win for the Irish. Graduate student Addy Vashistha would tack on the final win for the team with his come from behind victory 3-6, 6-0, 7-6(4) and make the team score 5-2 at the end of the first match.
After a quick break, Notre Dame took the court again to host the University of Illinois-Chicago. Dominko and Fu would tally their ninth win of the season and Halpin and Lee would take the #2 doubles spot to secure the early 1-0 lead.
In singles, Dominko on the top court and sophomore Brian Bilsey on court #4 would waste no time adding the second and third points with matching 6-0, 6-1 scores. This would set up freshman Noah Becker to get his first career clinch with a 6-3,…