March 23, 2008

Final Stats

HOUSTON - The No. 17 Rice men's tennis team completed an undefeated weekend and won the 46th Annual Rice Invitational with a 4-2 victory over No. 67 San Diego Sunday afternoon at Jake Hess Stadium.

The Owls (12-5) have won their home tournament in eight of the last 12 seasons.

Rice fell behind in doubles action as top pair of Christoph Müller and Filip Zivojinovic dropped an 8-4 decision to Chris Coetzee and Thomas Liversage.

The Owls regrouped behind Dennis Polyakov and Bruno Rosa, who upended Tamer Antabi and Charl Wolmarans 8-5 in the No. 3 match.

Tobias Scheil and Chong Wang turned in a hard-fought 8-6 win at the No. 2 spot over Dean Jackson and Nils Schive to give the Owls a 1-0 edge.

"I'm happy for our players after the injuries we've had to deal with this weekend"," head coach Ron Smarr said. "The scores were deceptive because these were three quality teams. We got wins in positions when we needed to. That's was the difference for us winning this tournament."

No. 49 ranked Müller opened singles play and emerged with a 6-1, 6-4 victory at No. 2 to make it 2-0.

Polyakov pushed the Rice lead to 3-0 and notched a 6-2, 6-3 over Jose Manuel Munoz in the No. 5 hole.

San Diego () rallied to close within 3-2 as Coetzee and Wolmarans strung together wins at No. 3 and No. 4 over Wang and Zivojinovic, respectively.

Rice has a 10-day hiatus before matching up with league rival on April 2nd against No. 8 Tulsa. First serve against the Golden Hurricane is slated for 1:30pm. Admission is free to Jake Hess Stadium.

"This was a tough weekend for us, but we had an excellent overall team effort for this entire weekend," Müller said. "It was important for us to get back on track after losing to FSU and LSU. We're looking forward to getting some rest. Tulsa is a big conference rival for us and we're going to have to fight hard to win."