Utah men’s tennis head coach Roeland Brateanu was relaxed and loose as he talked to media before his second season at the helm. He even started off his opening statement by cracking a joke about the current BYU-Utah basketball situation.
“Don’t worry — I’m not going to make any comments with regards to the basketball [schedule] or with regards to BYU,” Brateanu said.
Brateanu wants to improve from his rookie season as head coach, when the Utes finished 11-13 overall, at just 1-7 in Pac-12 play. Utah picked up its only win in conference play in 2015 on Senior Day against Arizona, beating the Wildcats 4-2.
The Utes lost key three seniors from that 2015 squad: Cedric Willems, Slim Hamza and Justin Archer. Despite that, Brateanu is confident that this team will be able to pick up the slack of departed players.
“We had a very good fall semester,” said Brateanu. “We won five singles titles and five doubles titles.”
This season, Utah fields a young team as just two seniors, Matt Cowley and Jamey Swiggert, are on the Utes’ roster. Cowley, the only Ute from the state of Utah, has played all of his collegiate career here at the U. As a junior in 2015, Cowley went 7-15 overall and finished 2-3 in conference play. Cowley is looking to finish his career strong, and the senior’s strong fall that saw him reach the finals of the Bobcat Invitational, where he lost to teammate Egbert Waverink, will help him do just that.
Swiggert, who transferred from Idaho State University in 2013, went 1-2 (1-1 Pac-12) in singles and 4-4 (0-2 Pac-12) in doubles in his debut season for Utah.
The only other upperclassman on the team is junior Parker McGuiness, and he is poised to have an explosive second season. The McKinney Boyd High School graduate was a highly recruited five-star player who signed with North Carolina State University. After making some noise as a freshman with the Wolfpack, McGuiness transferred to be a Ute.
During the 2015 season, McGuiness won Utah’s fourth all-time Pac-12 Men’s Tennis Player of the Week award after he swept BYU. He finished the season with a respectable 13-8 (2-4 Pac-12) in singles play, one of only two Ute netters to finish with a winning record in singles. McGuiness also tallied an 8-5 (0-2 Pac-12) ledger in doubles competition in the spring last season.
Following Cowley’s example of a strong fall season, McGuiness won the red flight at the Utah Intercollegiate Tournament last fall.
Utah returns four sophomores for the 2016 season, and from all over the world — Johan Jonhagen, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, Freddie McGeehan from London, England, Santiago Sierra, from Mexico City, Mexico, and Weverink, from Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The Utes will also introduce a trio of freshmen to the Pac-12 in 2016. Azat Hankuliyev, ranked as high as No. 2 in the state of Utah, joins the Utes for his first year, while Joe Woolley, from Boston, England, was ranked as high as No. 1 in Great Britain.
The standout among the freshman group, however, has been Dan Little, from London. Little reached the final at the 2015 ITA Regional Championship, and won the gray flight at the Utah Intercollegiate this fall. Little says he loves the team aspect of college tennis.
“Tennis is an individual sport, but in this scenario you get to be as a team, which is really good. I really like team sports. If you are playing badly, or you’re down, the teammates will be able to pick you up,” Little said.
Brateanu is excited to just get the spring season underway, and he is looking forward to the opportunity to watch his young team grow into contenders.
“We have a very exciting team. It’s a very young team, full of talent,” Brateanu said. “My expectation from this group is to put us in a position to make the NCAA Tournament. I think we have the capacity to do it, I think we have the talent to do it, and I think we have to depth to do it.”
Cowley shared his coach’s goal of reaching the NCAA Tournament.
“It has been far too long since we played there, and we would love to go dancing after the Pac-12 Championships,” Cowley said. “When you win with a team, it feels even greater. I’m looking forward to getting as many wins as possible in the spring.”
The Utes kick off their fall season Friday afternoon in picturesque Honolulu, Hawaii against the University of San Francisco Dons. The match starts at 2 p.m. MST.
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