January 27, 2017 - UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.; The Penn State Nittany Lions opened up play at the ITA Kickoff Weekend in Chapel Hill, N.C. today. Competition is hosted by the University of North Carolina and was played in the Cone-Kenfield Tennis Center.
The blue and white fell to the Vanderbilt Commodores today 4-1 after a hard fought battle.
Singles competition for the Lions today featured Constant De La Bassetiere (Reims, France), Christian Lakoseljac (King City, Ontario, Canada), Christos Antonopoulos (Athens, Greece), Marc Collado (Barcelona, Spain), Henry Gordon (New Braunfels, Tx.), and Ben Lieb (Newtown Square, Pa.). Sophomore Ben Lieb gained a strong 6-4, 6-4 win for the Lions against Vanderbilt's Panu Virtanen.
Penn State's doubles teams against Vanderbilt consisted of De La Bassetiere with Lakoseljac, David Kohan (Sydney, Australia) with Christian Lutschaunig (Richboro, Pa.), and Antonopoulos with Matt Galush (Cary, N.C.).
"For our first match of the year I thought we played really well considering we had three players that had never played a dual match before," said head coach Jeff Zinn following the match. "They performed extremely well against one of the best teams in the SEC and are only going to get better as the season goes along. I thought Ben Lieb played really well to win his match at #6. He is a really good anchor for us at the sixth singles position, and he showed it again today. I really like this team and the energy they bring everyday, we are going to keep striving to get better in our dual matches, and hopefully in a couple of months we will be right in the thick of things in the Big Ten."
"I can't say were terribly disappointed," said associate head coach Paul Tobin. "Vanderbilt had six dual matches under their belt already, so we knew they had been able to work out the kinks. We fought hard. We lost on 3-3 points, which is difficult, since there is no way to replicate that scenario during practice. But, we are going to only get better once we get more matches under our belt."
The Nittany Lions will compete in Chapel Hill again tomorrow against Notre Dame.
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