Men's tennis claims D-III NCAA crown

The Middlebury men’s tennis team capped a record-setting season with their second ever national championship last spring, defeating Amherst 5-1 at Oberlin College in Ohio.
“This team had a lot of seniors, so it was their last chance to win a title. Despite that added pressure, everyone played fearlessly in the finals,” said Andrew Peters ’11.
The win was the Panthers’ 23rd of the season, a new record for the program. Those 23 wins came with only two losses and included a shutout of Williams for the team’s sixth NESCAC championship. That win earned the men an automatic berth into the NCAA tournament, the rights to host one of the tournament’s regionals, and a first-round bye.
The Panthers began their march to the final with a 5-0 victory over Skidmore in the second round, and beat M.I.T by the same score in the regional final. They then pitched their third consecutive tournament shutout against North Carolina Wesleyan to advance to the NCAA semi-finals for the seventh time in eight years. Seventh-ranked Washington University in St. Louis, their semi-final opponent, provided significantly more resistance than any of the Panther’s previous tournament challengers.
The Panthers led the match 4-3 after doubles wins from the teams of Andrew Lee ’10 and Andrew Thomson ’10 and Eliot Jia ’10 and Conrad Olson ’10 and singles wins from Lee and Jia. Facing elimination, Washington’s John Watts defeated Peters in three sets to tie the match, but Olson was able to secure the semi-final victory with a three set victory in the final singles match and propel the Panthers to their fourth NCAA championship appearance, where they would face the Lord Jeffs in an all NESCAC final.
Doubles play was again an area of strength for Middlebury, with Lee and Thomson and Jia and Olson both posting wins for an early 2-0 lead. The Panthers were just as impressive in singles play, winning the first set in five of the six singles matches. Thomson delivered the first singles win for the men, and Lee and Olson completed two-set victories within moments of each other to clinch the championship.
“I played next to Lee in the finals, so I remember Lee’s match very well; he gave off this incredibly confident vibe, and he ripped forehand winners right and left, completely overpowering his opponent,” said Peters.
The title hardly came as a surprise to Middlebury, who entered the tournament with five all conference players (Jia, Lee, Olson, Peters and Thomson), the NESCAC player of the year (Lee), and the NESCAC coach of the year (Dave Schwarz, now the head coach at Brown) in tow. “Ever since Dave Schwarz started coaching here (so for the past 10 years), Middlebury tennis has been about hard work. Hard work always pays off, and last years teamworked harder and competed harder than the rest of the teams out there,” said Peters. Surely defeating Amherst and adding the national championship trophy to their already impressive stockpile of hardware from the regular season was exactly the ending the Panthers had in mind.