Men’s Tennis Concludes Fall Play at Marist Invitational
Men’s Tennis battled past its competition to have success at multiple levels of the Marist Invitational, their final event of the fall season.
Kobayashi was one of Fordham’s standout performers in Poughkeepsie. (Courtesy of Fordham Athletics)
The Fordham men’s tennis team has wrapped up fall play with this past weekend’s Marist Invitational and will not compete again until late January when the spring slate begins.
While the Rams did not play any high ranked Division I programs in the first part of the season, they did about as well as anyone could hope for, only dropping a handful of sets throughout two matches and two invitationals.
Their most recent matches took place this past weekend in Poughkeepsie. Merrimack College, Lafayette College and Fordham all made the trip, creating an A Flight, B Flight and C Flight for singles play. Coach Michael Sowter, who continues his duties as interim head coach while the athletic department pursues a new leader, elected to place Jofre Segarra and Juan Paredes in the A flight. Both seniors have had impressive fall seasons that earned them a spot atop the Fordham squad. While neither was able to take the A flight title this past weekend at Marist, they both won their first match in impressive fashion. Last week at home against Adelphi University, doubles play was not a strong point in the Rams win, but they were able to turn things around at Marist, winning the A Flight doubles competition and racking up a win in the B Flight.
Those latter two flights were where Fordham had the most success, as junior Toi Kobayashi and senior Tom Russwurm tied for the B Flight title while sophomores Robert Hagan and Rhett Bailey did the same at the C level. While there was no team scoring, each rolled off a pair of wins to get to the top of the event.
Fordham has rarely had such a dominant open to their season with the fall. This hot start has to feel good considering the head coaching situation is up in the air and two of the biggest recruits on this team were ruled out for the entirety of the 2021-2022 season. The next few months will be about continuing this momentum into the spring and trying to get better everyday. There are still a lot of questions to be answered but this fall season gave the Rams a lot to be enthusiastic about.
