Men's tennis grabs second in WCC Tourney

By Tom Schreier

Two is an important number in tennis.

A player is allowed two serves.

After the first game, the players change courts every two games.

It takes two sets to win a match.

This year's team finished second in the West Coast Conference for the second time in the past two years despite losing two seniors—Brian Brogan and Jay Wong—both of whom made a major impact on the team last season.

"We were hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst," said Head Coach Derek Mills, who is in his fourth year at Santa Clara. "We're actually ahead of where we were last year, which is pretty shocking."

The No. 47 Broncos lost to No. 34 San Diego in the WCC Championship. Many experts did not have Santa Clara in the top 75, let alone in the Conference Championship match.

"It was...nice to prove a lot of people wrong," said Mills. "[People] thought we were going to struggle because of the guys we lost, but we did another good job of recruiting and got some other players that can play."

Replacing Brogan and Wong this season were freshmen Kyohhei Kamono (Chiba, Japan) and John Lamble (Saratoga, Calif.).

Kamono was one of four international players on the team. The other three players are from California.

"That's the way college tennis is," says Mills. "It's an international game. It's mostly at the top schools. Actually, at some schools it's hard to find an American kid on the team."

"When you play an international player, you know you're playing some of the best worldwide," wrote sophomore Tom Pham (San Diego) in an email. "Weaker players don't travel as far away from home to play tennis at a top Division I [school]."

"We have four foreigners on our team. That's probably one of the [reasons] why our team is as good as it is."

Recruiting foreign players is difficult. There are great players all over the world — two on the team are from France, one from the Philippines, and one from Japan — and most colleges, including Santa Clara, do not have the budget to have their coaches watch the players in person.

"It's word-of-mouth [from] a lot of contacts all over the world," said Mills. "I get emails every day (from international players interested in Santa Clara), but out of the, say, ten emails a day, [the majority] don't work out.

"It's just very few that reach out to us are really quality guys we're looking at."

Mills said he does not offer the trite "good academics, good weather" answer when speculating why blue-chip international players are choosing Santa Clara over other institutions in the United States.

"It's me," he said, laughing. "The bottom line is, any way you want to slice the bread, they come here because we're all over them as coaches recruiting them."

"The California weather helps, but these kids come here to play tennis. There's no ifs ands or buts about it. If you want to make it sound nice: they come here for the school and they come here for all that kind of stuff, but they came here to play tennis."

"If we're all going to be honest: that's why all these kids come here — to play basketball, they come here to play whatever — they come here because they get along with the coach and they want to come play that sport at the school."

At No. 47, the Broncos are seven spots outside of the top 40 which will advance to the NCAA Tournament. The team believes they are playing at the level that they need to be to get into the tournament next season.

"We beat ranked (or formerly ranked) teams," said Pham. "With no seniors on our team this year, we expect to improve and do better next year."

Scheduling tough opponents, according to Mills, is the key to landing a spot  in the top-40. This season the team played notable programs at Stanford (L 4-0), UC-Santa Barbara (W 5-2), Vanderbilt (L 4-3) and Fresno State (L 4-3).

"The schedule is a huge deal in college tennis," said Mills. "We will probably have the toughest schedule we've ever had next year in preparation to increase our ranking and our level of tennis."

Two may be an important number in tennis, but there is only one number that really means anything:

One.

Contact Tom Schreier at tschreier@scu.edu or (408) 551-1918.