Men’s tennis team ready for this season

The Georgia College & State University Men’s Tennis team is gearing up for this upcoming season.

This year’s team is very similar to last year’s team, with seven guys coming back. The men’s team added two new members and lost one graduated senior.

Head Tennis Coach Steve Barsby said, “Hopefully that year of experience makes them a little better and makes them able to handle the pressure a little more against some tough conference teams that we lost to last year in close contests.”

The two new additions to this year’s men’s team are freshman James Gorin, who transferred in from Northwood, which is a pretty highly ranked team out of Michigan; and German freshman Florian Hieber, who should also be a good asset to the team.

“I think we’ll be a little deeper this year. The guys look like they improved some from last year. So I think we’ll be a little better,” Barsby commented on the returning of most of the team. “The biggest loss to the team from a year ago was obviously Jeff, who was our number one and had our best record last year. With two good additions in Gorin and Hieber, they make our rotation deeper. Where they’re going to play in the rotation is still to be determined.”

A standout for this upcoming season would be sophomore Alex Beauregard. Beauregard finished his season with a strong spring semester. Coach Barsby is also looking for big things from Swedish sophomore Mikael Pettersson.

With a relatively young team, Thomas Henderstaud stands out as a leader for the team.

“Thomas has been the most vocal person; he’s a hard worker, he’s been involved in tennis and soccer for most of his life, and he has a good team spirit,” said Coach Barsby.

GC&SU’s first ever men’s tournament will be held this weekend. It’s the GC&SU Men’s Fall Championship. GC&SU will be competing against Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC), Fort Valley University, and Mercer University; plus, it’s open to some men’s open players around the area, which will strengthen the competition some. The tournament this weekend starts today at 2:00p.m and continues into Saturday at a time to be announced. The finals are on Sunday.
Coach Barsby is looking forward to the tournament as a good experience and hopefully as a victory.

“Hopefully, I won’t just be watching Sunday and handing out trophies. Hopefully, I’ll be coaching some of our guys in the finals, too,” Coach Barsby said.

In a couple of weeks the men’s team will head down to Savannah for our NCAA Men’s South Fall Regional, then in late October they go down to Pensacola for their West Florida Fall Fling tournaments.

Last year the men’s team impressed a few teams with a solid finish at regional, last spring.

Coach Barsby has set a goal to at least get into the low twenties.

“We’re playing in a tough conference. We have a lot of tough matches. We play all of the teams that will give us the opportunity to be ranked; it’s just a matter of if we can come through and beat them. Last year we came in eighth in the conference. We’re going to have the opportunity to play nationally ranked teams and have a shot to be ranked. I think if we play well and keep progressing like we are, we should meet our goals and hopefully slip into the high teens.”

Here come the Bobcat tennis players, so watch for them before they pass you by.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 14 2001. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry