For the Cal men’s tennis team, attending the Audi Napa Valley Tennis Tournament in St. Helena, Calif. is tradition. So is winning. As harvest season approaches in wine country, the Bears themselves sowed the seeds for a successful preseason this past weekend.
“It was a high-level tournament,” said junior Greg Bayane. “It was good to compete against the juniors and some of the top players.”
Co-founded by Cal head coach Peter Wright, the 13th annual installment of the Napa Valley Tennis Tournament is a small-scale tournament of 32 players. In the draw were 24 collegiate players and eight members of the USTA Junior National Team. The addition of top-notch junior players to the tournament was part of USTA’s push to use the NCAA as a path to professional play.
“It’s exciting for the juniors to have an opportunity to play up,” said Wright. “It’s important for us to show that development.”
Many of the teams had a handful of their own top-50 players and doubles pairings. Texas A&M led with four ITA-ranked singles players and two top-10 doubles teams.
Cal was without top-ranked seniors Ben McLachlan and Campbell Johnson, who both have been out since the season-opening Harvard Chowder Fest due to injury.
Despite the absence, junior Nikhil Jayashankar led Cal with a perfect 3-0 record in his round-robin group. Over the tournament’s three days of play, Jayashankar posted straight-set wins over high school sophomore Lane Leschly (6-4, 6-4) and Boise State’s Nathan Sereke (6-3, 6-0), a match that included a four-and-a-half-hour rain delay.
Jayashankar began his campaign with a tight 3-6, 7-6(4), 6-4 win over Texas A&M’s Jordan Szabo on Friday. Jayashankar’s efforts earned him a slot in the shoot-out, a first-to-10 tie-breaker format. The shoot-out offered a wild-card entry to Solinco — a USTA futures pro circuit event — as the tournament’s grand prize. But Jayashankar lost in the quarterfinals against Florida State’s 56th-ranked Dominic Cotrone, 9-11.
“The shoot-out was high-quality,” said Jayashankar. “We both did well, but it came down to one or two shots that made the difference,”
San Diego’s sophomore Uros Petronijevic eventually clinched the wild-card entry, topping Alabama’s Daniil Proskura, 10-8, in the final round.
But Jayashankar’s teammates produced a mixed bag of results.
Freshman Andre Goransson had a record of 2-1, losing against Florida State’s 116th-ranked Benjamin Lock, the eventual Group 3 champion, 6-7(4), 3-6. Both first-year Filip Bergevi and Bayane fared with less success, only winning one match in their respective groups.
In doubles play, neither the Bayane-Jayashankar nor the Bergevi-Goransson duo advanced past the first round.
For the Bears, the Napa Valley Classic is part of the long four-month preseason largely dedicated to building the team, especially with two freshmen recruits.
“Preseason is for freshmen getting to know more about their game and how they respond in situations,” said Wright.
Jennifer Yu covers men’s tennis. Contact her at [email protected].