ITHACA, N.Y. — The men's tennis team will look to make one last push for a share of the Ivy League title and a possible berth in the NCAA tournament this weekend when it wraps up its regular season with matches against Penn and Princeton. The Big Red hosts the Quakers at 2 p.m. Friday at Reis Tennis Center, then travels to the Garden State for a 1 p.m. Sunday match against the Tigers.
Cornell (9-10, 3-2 Ivy League) is currently ranked 55th in the country by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association, meaning it will likely need a big jump to move into a position for the program's first-ever at-large berth to NCAAs. The Big Red can also still win a share of the Ivy League title with two wins this weekend, two Columbia losses this weekend (also against Penn and Princeton), plus one or more losses from Dartmouth over its final three matches. Due to Ivy League tiebreaker rules, Cornell cannot secure the Ivy League's automatic berth into the NCAA tournament.
The Big Red is coming off victories last weekend at Brown, 4-1 on Saturday and at Yale, 5-2 on Sunday. Senior
Stefan Vinti won both of his matches at #3 to improve to a perfect 4-0 in singles in Ivy matches, and freshman
David Volfson has now won three consecutive matches in straight sets from the #1 position. Junior
Dylan Brown also won his first singles match of the dual season in three sets at #6 against Yale. The #1 doubles pairing of Volfson and junior
Colin Sinclair has ascended to 66th in the national rankings.
Penn (7-13, 2-2 Ivy) is coming off a pair of road losses to nationally-ranked teams in Harvard and Dartmouth last weekend. Freshman Kyle Mautner accounted for the Quakers' lone point of the weekend, winning a #1 singles match against Harvard's Nicky Hu on Saturday. The doubles team of Austin Kaplan and Nicholai Westergaard are ranked 79th in the country by the ITA.
The Quakers lead the all-time series, 44-39-1, dating back to the teams' first meeting in 1906, but Cornell has won the last eight Ivy League meetings and 16 of the last 18 dating back to 1997. Last year, the Big Red rolled to a 7-0 victory in Philadelphia.
Princeton (14-8, 2-2) was also swept last weekend by Dartmouth and Harvard, sending the Tigers down nine spots in the ITA rankings to 46th — its lowest ranking since late February. Alexander Day and Luke Gamble are ranked 86th in the country in doubles, where they have posted a 12-5 record from the #1 position. Diego Vives is 8-11 from the #1 singles spot, and Thomas Colautti and Day typically round out the top half of the order.
Princeton holds a dominating 91-9-1 record against Cornell since the squads first met in 1906, but the Big Red has won six of the last 10 meetings. The Tigers eked out a pair of 4-3 victories last season, plus a 5-1 win earlier this year in the final of the ECAC Indoor Championships.
