Racquet men blast Quakers, Tigers

In the middle of last Friday’s (April 11) men’s tennis doubles match versus visiting Penn, the electronic scoreboard keeping track of court three stopped working. As the action went on undisrupted, the (temporarily nonfunctioning) scoreboard was hardly missed, or necessary. The play of Crimson tandem Dan Nguyen ’08 and Aba Omodele-Lucien ’11 told the story just fine.

The veteran Nguyen and freshman Omodele-Lucien repeatedly frustrated their Quaker counterparts with keen net play, expertly threading the ball between Justin Fox and Adam Schwartz of Penn to pick up a handful of points. Members of last year’s Ivy co-championship team, Fox and Schwartz of Penn dished it back, but by then Nguyen and Omodele-Lucien were on pace to secure the match, 8-6, to complete the doubles sweep for Harvard.

The good times continued to roll for the Crimson in singles action. Remarkably, the hosts surrendered just a single set (Omodele-Lucien was edged 6-3 before capturing the next two sets) on their way to earning the 7-0 victory, marking Harvard’s first shutout of the season.

Harvard nearly notched a repeat performance against visiting Princeton the following afternoon (April 12), if not for Peter Capkovic’s hard-earned win over Crimson senior Ashwin Kumar (6-1; 5-7; 17-15). In other singles matches, Nguyen bettered his Tiger opponent with a 6-4, 7-6 effort to grab his ninth-straight singles victory, while Sasha Ermakov ’09 overpowered his Princeton challenger, 6-1, 7-5. Including the doubles point, Harvard went on to capture the match, 6-1, improving to 4-0 in the Ancient Eight (12-6 overall).

The Cambridge men will host their third-consecutive conference match this Friday (April 18) against Yale (2-2 Ivy) at 2 p.m. Visit http://www.gocrimson.com for the latest updates.