Men’s Tennis to Face SMU in Conference Championship Opener

Friday, April 21

Lake Nona, Fla.

9:00 AM (ET)

University of Memphis

#35 SMU

Photo by: Joe Murphy

Men’s Tennis to Face SMU in Conference Championship Opener

Apr 18, 2017 | Men's Tennis

17 Men s Tennis Bracket 4 17 17

Tigers earn a five seed and will face four seed in quarterfinals.

By: Tammy DeGroff

MEMPHIS – The #36 ranked Memphis men's tennis team will face #35 SMU in the American Athletic Conference quarterfinals, Friday, at the USTA Tennis Center in Lake Nona, Fla., at 9 a.m. (ET). The winner of that match (pitting the four and five seeds against one another) could see top ranked USF in the conference semifinals on Saturday. USF will face the winner of the East Carolina/UConn match at the same time the Mustangs and Tigers are playing on Friday to try to advance to the semifinals.

The SMU/Memphis match is a rematch from a match the Tigers played back on April 1^st, where Memphis came back from a 2-0 deficit for a 4-2 win in a match that took almost four hours.

In that last meeting, SMU took the doubles point with wins at two and three. Hunter Johnson then got the win over Andrew Watson for the 2-0 lead. But Chris Patzanovsky started the Memphis comeback with a 6-3, 6-4 win at four. Freshman teammate Jan Pallares followed shortly after that with a straight set win of his own and Felix Rauch added his own straight set win at six to give the Tigers their first lead at 3-2. Junior Kai Lemke closed out the win, 6-4, 5-7, 6-1 at three to give Memphis its second conference win of the season.

After falling at Memphis, SMU went 3-2 in its final five matches, grabbing non-conference wins over Prairie View A&M, New Orleans and Rice, and falling 4-2 to visiting USF and 6-1 at Tulane.

Live scoring from the men's match can be found http://www.tennisticker.de/usa/ustanc/lp.html?lid=16.