GRAND FORKS, N.D. – The No. 65-ranked University of Denver men's tennis team (16-6, 5-0 Summit) earned a 5-0 win in the regular-season finale at North Dakota on Sunday, securing the Summit League regular-season title and handing UND its only League loss of the year.
 
Denver has now won the Summit League regular-season title in six consecutive years and 10 times total.
 
DU secured the title after its 5-0 win at North Dakota on Sunday afternoon, despite an equipment delay that pushed the match's start time back about two hours and moved play outdoors.
 
Doubles:
DU came through with wins at Nos. 2 and 3 doubles to win the first point of the match. Juniors Ryoma Mishiro and Raffaello Papajcik got on the board first with a 6-3 win in the No. 3 match, claiming their first break lead of the day to go up 5-3 after a tight start to the match.
 
Senior Daniel Sancho Arbizu and freshman Theo Coats clinched the doubles point with just one more game lost than Papajcik/Mishiro and did so after going down a break at the start of play. After a 0-2 start, the DU duo won four consecutive games on the way to a 6-4 win.
 
The No. 1 match featuring Denver graduate student Connor Robb-Wilcox and senior Rikuto Yamaguchi went back and forth before being abandoned with the Pioneers up, 6-5.
 
Singles:
Denver won all four of the completed singles matches and did so in straight sets in each of them. Yamaguchi was the first DU player to wrap up his match and the first of four Pioneers to reach a perfect 5-0 record in Summit League singles matches. He won the match's first five games to take the first set, 6-1, and opened the second set with a break as well. He turned a 2-0 lead into a 5-2 lead before finishing it off one game later.
 
Mishiro also won his fifth Summit League singles match to put DU within a point of the win, initially gaining the upper hand with a break for 5-3 in the first. He also earned the first break of the second set and added another one on his way to a 6-2 second set of his own.
 
The clinching point came from Robb-Wilcox at No. 6 singles with matching 6-2 wins. In both sets, he held a break advantage midway through and gained a 5-2 lead before closing it out with just one more game played.
 
Sancho Arbizu was able to finish out his match, also in straight sets and also at 6-2 6-2, needing just a couple moments more than Robb-Wilcox. His two sets followed near-identical patterns as Robb-Wilcox as well with breaks in the middle as part of at least four-game win streaks.
 
At No. 2 singles, Papajcik added yet another 6-2 win in the first set for DU but was in the midst of a back-and-forth second set when play was abandoned.
 
Freshman Samuel Rovai, too, was unable to finish his match but had staged a comeback from a 3-5 deficit in the first set to win it, 7-5. His opponent responded with a strong second-set win, but the players did not begin a third set to determine an outcome.
 
Up Next:
The University of Denver will host the 2025 Summit League Tennis Championships on April 18-19 at Denver Tennis Park. Denver has secured the No. 1 seed for the tournament. Additional information regarding the tournament, including selections and brackets, will be released by Monday.
 
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