Box Score (.pdf)
Spartanburg, S.C. – The USC Upstate men's tennis team played its second straight home match to open the season on Saturday morning and dropped a 6-1 decision to the Appalachian State Mountaineers at the USC Upstate Tennis Complex.
USC Upstate falls to 1-1 on the season while Appalachian State improves to 1-1 overall.
The Mountaineers won two of the three doubles matches to capture the point and lead the Spartans 1-0. In the No. 3 match, the combination of Luka Eble and Felix Ewers earned a 6-3 victory against Spencer Brown and Campbell Stone.
Appalachian State followed by winning five of the six singles matches to earn the 6-1 victory. Francisco Neto earned his second straight singles win of the season playing in the No. 2 match. For the second straight match, Neto won in three sets after topping Milo Bargeron 6-1, 4-6, 6-4.
Ewers took his No. 1 singles match against Scott Webster into the third set but would fall 6-4, 0-6, 1-6.
COACH'S QUOTE
"Congratulations to Appalachian State for today. They're a good team and they compete hard every match. I thought we tried to dig deep today and we competed really well, but we've got a bunch of guys who are playing through some injuries at the moment and we just didn't quite have enough to get over the hump against a good team today. Our doubles was much better today and had we pulled out that tiebreak it probably would have changed the complexion of the match a bit. Francisco (Neto) did a great job again today of battling out a three-set win. We've got a couple of things we're going to work on this week to get ready for Presbyterian College next Thursday." – Tim McLane, assistant coach
UP NEXT
USC Upstate begins a five-match road trip on Thursday, Feb. 1 against Presbyterian College at 2 p.m.
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