Skip To Main Content

Daemen University Athletics

Western New York's Premier Division II Team
Fearless, Integrity, Effort, Respect, Commitment, Excitement
wilde mten vs rwc 21
8
Winner District of Columbia UDCM (5-6, 1-2 ECC)
1
Daemen DAEM (6-15, 1-3 ECC)
Winner
District of Columbia UDCM
(5-6, 1-2 ECC)
8
Final
1
Daemen DAEM
(6-15, 1-3 ECC)

Match Recap: Men's Tennis | | By Mike Miranto, Sr. Associate A.D. for External Operations & Communications

Men's Tennis Postseason Hopes Dashed In Loss to UDC

WILLIAMSVILLE, N.Y. - The Daemen College men's tennis team saw their postseason hopes dashed today with an 8-1 loss to the University of the District of Columbia at Miller Tennis Center. With the loss, Daemen dropped to 6-16 on the season, including a 1-4 mark in ECC play. A win today would have clinched Daemen's first-ever berth in the East Coast Conference Championship Tournament which features the top four teams in the league's final regular season standings. Instead, it was the visiting Firebirds (6-6, 2-2 ECC) that clinched a postseason berth with one more ECC match remaining on their schedule.

UDC opened the match by sweeping through doubles play to take a 3-0 lead. Alexis Baguelin (Le Houlme, France) and Sebastian Mermersky (Washington, D.C.) scored an 8-5 win in the first doubles position over Daemen's Fabian Wilde (Crimmitschau, Germany) and Jose Williamson III (Minneapolis, Minn.). Ander Murillo (Mondragon, Spain) and Marco Marinic (Ogulin, Croatia) won by an identical 8-5 score in third doubles over Mark Veitengruber (Rockford, Mich.) and Pablo Martinez Hernandez (Huatulco, Mexico). And, in a competitive 9-7 match at second doubles, Rok Bozic (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Marco Feligioni (Citta di Castello, Italy) emerged victorious over David Gonzalez Villegas (Pereira, Colombia) and Ricardo Ruiz Martinez (Valencia, Spain).

In singles play, Mermersky made it 4-0 in UDC's favor with his 6-2, 6-4 defeat of Gonzalez Villegas in the top spot of the lineup.

Wilde broke through and put Daemen on the board with a 6-4, 6-3 defeat of Murillo in the fourth singles position. For Wilde, it was his 13th singles win of the season as he becomes just the third player in team history to reach that total. It also gives him 40 combined singles/doubles wins in his career, just the seventh player in team history to reach that milestone.

Unfortunately, that was the only point that Daemen would muster in the match. Baguelin (6-4, 7-5) won a competitive match in the third singles position, as did Bozic (4-6, 6-4, 6-2) in the second singles position. Marinic (6-2, 5-7, 1-0 in fifth singles) and Feligioni (4-6, 6-1, 1-0 in sixth singles) added three-set victories to provide the final margin.

Veitengruber, Daemen's lone senior and the team's all-time leader in singles wins (47), combined singles/doubles wins (79), singles matches (101) and doubles matches (99), was honored in a brief pre-match ceremony commemorating the final home match of his career.

With their ECC season now closed, the Wildcats will officially wrap up the 2017-18 season with a pair of non-conference road matches this weekend against Millersville University (Saturday, April 14) and Jefferson University (Sunday, April 15).
Print Friendly Version