For the fourth straight season Mississippi State’s men’s tennis hosted the first and second rounds of the NCAA Men’s Tennis Championships and for the second straight year the team has advanced to the Super Regionals on the heels of back-to-back sweeps.
The No. 6 Bulldogs (23-5) opened the action at the A.J. Pitts Tennis Centre on Saturday with a clean 4-0 sweep of Tennessee Tech in which they didn’t drop a single set. Their victory set up a showdown against No. 33 Wisconsin, which defeated Samford 4-1 in the first round, and MSU continued its domination with another 4-0 win.
The doubles duo of Mario Martinez Serrano and Niccolo Baroni got the ball rolling early with a 6-3 win, and Bryan Hernandez Cortes and Petar Jovanovic clinched the first point of the match with a 6-4 victory against the Badgers’ Matthew Fullerton and Patrik Meszaros.
The Bulldogs continued its triumph in singles play behind Cortes’ 6-3, 6-2 win over Sachiv Kumar – his career-best 11th-straight set win. Benito Sanchez Martinez added to the team’s lead with a 6-3, 6-0 victory on Court 1, and Serrano capped the sweep off on Court 4 with a 6-1, 6-4 win over Edouard Aubert.
State will play No. 12 Georgia (20-8) at home in a Super Regional match at noon on Saturday for a trip to play either South Carolina or Virginia in the quarterfinals at Athens, Ga, from May 14-17. The Bulldogs swept Elon University and NC State 4-0 to punch their ticket to Starkville. The two teams battled in a Top-10 clash earlier in the year in SEC play – a 4-2 State win.
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