Flushing, N.Y.- The third-seeded UMBC men's tennis team upset
No. 2-seeded Stony Brook, 4-1, and moved into Sunday's title match
vs. No. 1 Binghamton. The tournament is being contest at the U.S.
National Tennis Center.
The Retrievers and Bearcats met for the 2011 championship and
the top-seeded Bearcats prevailed, 4-1.
UMBC (10-9) avenged a regular season 4-3 setback to the
Seawolves with the semifinal victory.
The doubles point came down to the match at the No. 2 position,
where the freshmen duo of Juan Manual
Aranzazu (Ibague, Colombia) and Daniel Gray
(/Bullis) prevailed in a tie-breaker, 9-8 (7-3).
Stony Brook evened the match with a win at No. 4 singles, but
freshman Kamal
Patel (Germantown, Md./Seneca Valley) came through with a 7-5,
6-4 victory at the No. 6 slot to regain the lead for the
Retrievers.
The other four matches would all head to third sets.
Senior Joe
Adewumi (Phoenix, Ariz.) dropped the first set, 6-4, at
No. singles, but rallied for a 4-6, 6-2, 6-3 win over Bertrand.
With the matches at No. 3 and No. 5 nearly even, UMBC
senior Cristian Hodel (Calarasi, Romania) won the biggest
match of his Retriever career, edging SBU's Nikita Fomin, 7-6, 5-7,
6-4 at No. 1 singles to give the Retrievers the hard-earned
victory.
It was just Fomin's third loss of the season at the No. 1
singles position.
UMBC is seeking its second America East title- they captured
their first in 2007.
