M. Tennis earns respect at ITA Regionals

Fanda Stejskal paved the way for Penn by getting into the fourth round. All season long, Penn men's tennis coach Gordie Ernst has told his players that if they practice hard, it will eventually pay off. This weekend, at the ITA Fall Regional Championships, it finally did. The Quakers sent their top three singles players -- sophomore Fanda Stejskal, junior co-captain Eric Sobotka and freshman Ryan Harwood -- as well as the No. 1 doubles team of Harwood and senior Brett Meringoff to the tournament at Princeton. And while this weekend was the third time the Red and Blue have ventured into Tigers territory this season, it was anything but another competition for the Quakers. With the top players from across the Eastern region in attendance, a chance to go to Nationals was on the line. Although no one from Penn qualified for Nationals, the Quakers -- after fine performances by all of their representatives -- made their mark on the rest of the competition. In fact, Sobotka was the lone Quaker not to record a win. The junior lost to Ralph Vandeplasse of Marist 6-2, 6-2 in the second round after receiving a bye in the first. If Sobotka's performance was disappointing, the rest of the team's was anything but. Harwood, Penn's No. 3 in just his first collegiate tennis season, advanced to the third round after beating Bucknell's T. K. Kelly and Dartmouth's Robert Chen, the Big Green's No. 1 player. "Beating Chen 7-5, 6-4 was a great win because it showed Dartmouth that a Penn player who isn't No. 1 can beat their No. 1," Harwood said. "I played well against him and really stuck it to him." In the third round, Harwood was ousted 6-3, 6-3 by the tournament's No. 4 seed, Princeton's Kyle Kliegerman. Though Harwood was out of contention in singles play, that was not the last the Tigers saw of the Long Island native. In the doubles competition Harwood, partnered with Meringoff, again faced Kliegerman. The Princeton star teamed with Ahn Ahn Liu as the tournament's fifth-seeded tandem. This time, the Quakers came out on top, defeating Princeton's No. 1 duo, 8-4. "Beating Princeton's No. 1 team was a great win for us," Meringoff said. "Firstly, because we were unseeded and we wanted revenge because we thought we should have been. Secondly, because Princeton is a big rival of ours and we wanted to shut them up a little bit." The pair was not done, though. The two went on to beat a pair from Fairleigh Dickinson 8-4 before falling in the quarterfinals in a close match, 6-3, 7-6 (6) to fourth-seeded Eric Scharf and Jaideep Shetty of St. John's. "The St. John's match was a great match," Meringoff said. "The only difference in the whole match was one break when they broke my serve in the first set. The match was really neck and neck the whole way." After a disappointing performance at the Penn Conference Classic just two weeks ago, Harwood and Meringoff's improvement is all the more remarkable. Part of the difference may have been purely mental. "This time around, we kept saying we weren't going to accept losing, because if you accept losing you can't win," Harwood said. "We took it one point at a time and mentally we stayed focused." And, while the duo impressed many by showing it should have been seeded at the tournament, one Quaker -- Stejskal -- already was. The Czech native was seeded sixth out of a field of 96. After a first round bye, Stejskal showed why he was seeded, defeating Brown No. 2 Chris Wolfe, 6-4, 6-2, and Cornell No. 1 Mike Halperin, 6-2, 6-4 to advance to the fourth round. It was there that his run at the title was stopped, 6-2, 3-6, 6-3, by unseeded Davor Dupljak of Virginia Tech. "It was unlucky-- maybe the gods don't like me," Stejskal joked. "I tried everything and nothing worked." Yet, even in defeat, there was much to praise in Stejskal's performance. "Fanda's match was probably the best performance of a Penn singles player since I've been at Penn," Ernst said. "The quality of the game and the match he played was as high as any I've seen in college tennis as a coach. "Fanda played like a warrior. He threw everything at [Dupljak], including the kitchen sink, but [Dupljak] just threw it right back at him." In fact, the match was played so well that other teams and coaches took notice. "All the other coaches were talking about the match and the equality of every point," Ernst said. That is the kind of attention for which the Quakers have been waiting. With three strong performances by Penn this weekend, the team is well on its way to achieving its goal of national recognition. "For us to do so well in a tournament containing the best players in the East and still be out there on the last day of the tournament is great," Harwood said. "That's what we want -- the University of Pennsylvania name to be engraved on the last day of every tournament." If the team works hard throughout the winter training period, it has a very real chance of achieving that goal -- and of making an impact in the spring Ivy title race.

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