Cougar men’s tennis has sights set on MWC tournament title

The No. 33 BYU men’s tennis team begins Mountain West Conference tournament play today in Las Vegas, hoping to defend its regular-season title earned last week.

“We’re certainly not taking anything for granted,” BYU coach Brad Pearce said in a news release. “We will be well prepared for Friday.”

Having received a quarterfinal bye, the No. 1 seed Cougars (21-5, 6-0 MWC) will play the TCU Horned Frogs today at 3 p.m. in the second day of the MWC men’s tennis tournament. Utah and TCU played Thursday at 10 a.m. after high winds caused the match to be postponed.

TCU knocked out the No. 5 seed Utes with a 4-2 victory. Leading the Horned Frogs are Emanuel Brighiu, Zach Nichols and Christopher Price, who were each selected to the All-Mountain West Conference team. TCU is currently ranked No. 69 in the country.

For the first time since the creation of the MWC, BYU has topped the conference in regular-season play. BYU began conference play this season with wins against Air Force and New Mexico. After a loss to non-conference opponent SMU, the Cougars came back to beat TCU, San Diego State, UNLV and Utah.

Thomas Shubert and Evan Urbina lead the Cougar team. Both were recently named to the All-MWC singles team. Shubert holds a 29-11 record this season and has been named player of the week once while Urbina holds a 26-11 record and has been named player of the week three times.

“We feel great about winning the regular-season championship,” Pearce said. “But we realize that every team in this conference is good and dangerous.”

No. 4 seed TCU (9-12, 3-3 MWC) came out strong in its last match against BYU, taking a 3-0 lead. The Cougars came back to win the remaining matches against the Horned Frogs and edge TCU.

During that meet, a matchup between BYU’s Urbina and TCU’s Nichols resulted in a 3-1 set victory for the Cougars (6-4, 6-7, 2-7, 6-3). In doubles, TCU outplayed BYU, winning two of the three matches. The Cougars came back to dominate the singles matches, winning four of the six.

If the Cougars win today, they will go on to play the victor of the match between No. 2 seed San Diego State and No. 6 seed UNLV in the championship matchup on Saturday morning at 10 a.m.

This article was published on April 30, 2010 by the Daily Universe, BYU’s student newspaper sponsored by the BYU Department of Communications. The article can be found in its original format here.