DES MOINES, Iowa – The No. 43-ranked University of Denver men's tennis team (22-0, 5-0 Summit) battled through to a 4-1 win over North Dakota in the Summit League semifinals on Friday.
With the win, Denver advanced to its fifth-consecutive Summit League final match and kept its undefeated season alive.
Doubles:
DU started with its 14
th-straight doubles point won, earning victories from its top two teams. The first win of the day came on the No. 2 court from graduate student
Marvin Schaber and junior
Daniel Sancho Arbizu, who started with a break in their first return game and added a second break in what was the final game for 6-2.
Senior
Nicolas Herrero Cuesta and junior
Rikuto Yamaguchi clinched the point for DU at No. 1 doubles after earning what proved to be the only break needed to go up 3-1 and pushed it to a 5-2 lead before closing it at 6-3.
Denver's No. 3 team of graduate student
Anish Sriniketh and sophomore
Raffaello Papajcik were down an early break in their match but fought back to level things at 4-4 when the match was abandoned.
Singles:
North Dakota came out strong in singles, forcing Denver to dig in and work back from three, first sets lost. The No. 3 match was the first and only to wrap up in straight sets, going in UND's favor to level the dual at 1-1.
Sriniketh put Denver back in the lead with a come-from-behind win at No. 4 singles. After dropping the first set, the graduate student lost just one game for the remainder of the match. Both players held to begin the second set, after which Sriniketh won 10 straight games.
Sancho Arbizu, too, rallied back from a set down with dominant second and third sets. He broke for the first of five times in the fourth game of the second set and broke once more in the eighth game to force a decisive set. He broke two more times to claim a 5-0 lead before UND's Victor Moreno Lozano held for the first and only time in the final frame, setting Sancho Arbizu up to serve out the No. 2 match and give DU a 3-1 overall lead.
The final three remaining matches were all deep in third sets when senior
Charlie Miller put away the No. 6 singles match to clinch the win for Denver. He split the first two sets 6-3 3-6 and saw the third set begin on serve until he claimed the critical break to go up 3-2 and consolidated for 4-2, then broke one more time in the ninth and final game.
Both Herrero Cuesta at No. 1 singles and Papajcik at No. 6 singles had pulled away in their respective third sets – both after winning the first set but dropping the second – when Miller sealed the DU win.
Up Next:
The No. 1-seeded University of Denver men's tennis team will face host and No. 2 seed Drake in the Summit League final, set for Saturday, April 20, at 2 p.m. CT/1 p.m. MT.
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