After suffering its first loss of the year at No. 25 Notre Dame, Northwestern (10-1) bounced back this weekend, pummeling Western Michigan 5-2 and No. 48 Harvard 7-0.
Senior Marc Dwyer built off possibly the biggest win of his career over Notre Dame’s 18th-ranked Brett Helgeson on Thursday, beating both of his opponents in straight sets this weekend.
NU’s top doubles team of Dwyer and freshman Tobias Reitz continued to struggle this weekend. While the pair beat Zeyad Montasser and Michael Calderone from Western Michigan 8-3 Saturday, they lost to Harvard’s Alexei Chijoff-Evans and Chris Clayton by the same score Sunday. The duo is 5-5 on the year, but coach Arvid Swan is not concerned.
“I’m confident in the team,” Swan said. “They haven’t played together a real long time, and the level that they have to play at No. 1 doubles is very high. So we’ve got to continue to work on it, but I’m confident that they’re going to have success at that position.”
At No. 2 doubles, junior Alex Sanborn and freshman Josh Graves lost their first match of the year Saturday against Kevin Hayward and Casey Cullen, but the two rebounded to produce great weekends. Graves, 9-0 this year playing at Nos. 5 and 6 singles, won both of his matches this weekend, dropping only nine games total. Sanborn, 10-1 while playing at Nos. 3 and 4 singles, also won both of his matches while only losing nine games.
Graduate student Alexander Thams and sophomore Andrew McCarthy won both of their matches this weekend at No. 3 doubles, and the two combined to go 3-0 in singles as well.
Overall, NU went 12-2 on the weekend, dropping its only two points to Western Michigan.
“We had a tough week this weekend with matches on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, against three good teams, two of them ranked,” Reitz said. “Against Notre Dame we came down to the last match, finished a bit unlucky, but it was a great step forward for our program. Yesterday it was a convincing win. And today against Harvard, a clean sweep, you can’t do it any better… All in all a great weekend.”
Now the Wildcats hit the road for a stretch of six road matches. Next up for NU is William & Mary on Friday and Old Dominion on Sunday. The Cats will return to Evanston on March 28 to face Michigan State.
While the Cats have only played two road matches all season, Swan thinks the team is ready.
“It’s tough playing on the road, but we’re up to the challenge,” Swan said. “It’s just taking a plane flight and playing at a different place and getting used to those courts. And that’s not that hard to do; we have talented kids that can get used to different facilities.”
