The Ball State University mens' tennis team had a great showing at the Tom Fallon Invitational at the University of Notre Dame. Against highly competitive players from Drake, Michigan, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Purdue and Wisconsin, the Cardinals continued to make progress in the fall.
"Fall is good for evaluating the players. So far, we are moving in the right direction," coach Bill Richards said.
Junior Joe Epkey had outstanding play at Notre Dame, winning three of four singles matches and taking three doubles matches with two players.
"Joe had an outstanding weekend," Richards said.
On doubles, Epkey defeated (with Matt Baccarani) the team of Paul Rose and Scott Warner from Purdue, (with Joe Vallee) Peter Aarts and Andrew Mazlin of Michigan and Stephen Bass and Santiago Montoya of Notre Dame. While playing singles, he defeated Marc Dwyer of Northwestern, Sergi Vila of Drake, Jarred Leibner of Purdue and lost to Sheeva Parbhu of Notre Dame.
No. 79 Baccarani played only two singles matches during the weekend. In his first match, he defeated the number one singles player at Purdue, Colin Foster (7-6, 6-3). His second match was against Notre Dame's number one singles player, No. 74 Stephen Bass. Baccarani was defeated by Bass 6-4, 6-4.
Ball State swept Michigan in doubles matches over the weekend. The duo of No. 15 Baccarani and Patrick Thompson defeated No. 22 Brian Hung and Matko Maravic 8-3. Other Cardinals doubles winners over Michigan were Jarrod Epkey and Tony Epkey, Joe Epkey and Joe Vallee and Joe Perdomo and Danny Vidal.
The school to beat during the weekend was host Notre Dame. Every school struggled against the Fighting Irish, but coach Richards was satisfied with how the Cardinals played against them.
"All our matches were highly competitive with Notre Dame," he said. "We definitely played them very tough. I liked what I saw."
Notre Dame has four of its six starters in the top 125 nationally in singles.
"We stayed right there with them, Jarrod [Epkey] and Tony just ran out of gas," Richards said. "And two weekends in a row with marathon matches gets physically demanding."
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