After losing to No. 37 Michigan at home on March 29, No. 42 Northwestern finished the regular season strong, winning five of its final six matches. Despite this progress, the outcome of Friday’s Big Ten Tournament match was nearly identical.
Once again, the match-clinching win for the Wolverines was at No. 1 singles, where Michigan sophomore Jason Jung defeated NU senior Marc Dwyer in three sets. Dwyer took the first set 6-3, but then lost the second set, 3-6, and lost again in a close third set, 4-6.
The loss at No. 1 singles gave the Wolverines a 4-2 victory over the Wildcats. Once a team gets to four points in the Big Ten Tournament, play is stopped. Freshman Tobias Reitz kept the match alive when NU was down 3-1, by winning a second-set tiebreak to force a third set in his match.
“He played clutch,” NU coach Arvid Swan said. “He did a great job in the second set to keep us alive, and in the third set he was up 6-5 and had a great opportunity to win if we had been able to finish that match.”
Reitz’s win in the second set gave the Cats a chance to come back, which junior captain Alex Sanborn took advantage of in his match at No. 5 singles. He won his first set but lost the second, and said he noticed his opponent glancing at Reitz’s match during the third set.
“I could tell within my match that my opponent was looking towards Toby’s match and hoping for his teammate to clinch the match,” Sanborn said. “He was distracted by that, so I took it to him. That helped me win my match.”
Sanborn won his third set 6-2, but the win would be the last for NU. Jung edged out Dwyer before Reitz could finish his match. The team was trying to dig itself out of a hole after losing the doubles point to Michigan.
In the regular season matchup, the Cats also lost the doubles point, as the No. 1 pair of Dwyer and Sanborn was the only team to win its match. This time, the No. 3 doubles team of graduate student Alexander Thams and sophomore Andrew McCarthy was the only pair to win.
“It was frustrating because Marc and I won our doubles match against them last time,” Sanborn said. “If we had won that doubles match we could have won the match, but we really stayed positive after the doubles, and we knew that we could still beat them.”
With the loss, NU is on the bubble list of teams trying to reach the NCAA tournament. With the team’s current ranking of 42, Swan says it is too close to call.
“It’s going to be very close,” Swan said. “We’re hoping we’re going to get in. We finished strong; we won five of our last seven matches in our conference. We try to present ourselves in the best way possible and let the NCAA make that decision.”
Sanborn said the fact that the team has been competitive all year should give them an edge over other teams.
“We definitely should make it,” Sanborn said. “We’ve only been blown out once this year, and that was against Ohio State. Every other match against every other good team we’ve played has been 4-3. We know we can compete with almost any other team. We deserve to make the tournament.”
