Even after winning his match, North Carolina freshman Jose Hernandez didn’t leave the court.
Instead, he hit ball after ball in a drill he calls “Speed and Power,” in which he has to return eight balls hit all over the court at him in rapid succession.
“It makes me feel faster and makes me hit quicker through the ball and put it back in play,” Hernandez said. “I didn’t do that well in the match, so I wanted to clean it up right away.”
Hernandez normally only does the drill two days before a match.
But after No. 30 UNC’s 6-1 win Monday against No. 40 N.C. State, he said he felt he needed to do some extra work.
Hernandez was only one of many players on both sides to experience frustration during the match.
The tension did not just come from players’ personal struggles. Tar Heels Brennan Boyajian and Cameron Ahari both had several issues with officiating during their matches, as did N.C. State’s Jaime Pulgar.
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In college tennis, players are responsible for calling when balls are out. The judges are mainly there to settle disagreements.
Ahari said Pulgar, one of his doubles opponents, seemed to get especially rattled when some calls didn’t go his way.
“He got overruled twice, but you just have to play past it. People are going to make bad calls and you need to stay focused,” Ahari said. “But he just seemed really frustrated the whole match.”
At one point during his doubles loss to Ahari and top UNC player Clay Donato, Pulgar spent minutes on the sideline unsuccessfully arguing a call with the chair judge.
And near the end of his singles match against Donato, which he also lost, a clearly exasperated Pulgar picked up three tennis balls and swatted them over the fence surrounding the playing area and into an adjacent set of courts.
Fellow Wolfpack player Dominic Hodgson reacted similarly after back-to-back double faults to lose his singles match to Hernandez, immediately turning and flinging his racket against the boundary fence.
Boyajian said the number of judging issues that came up during his matches was unusually high.
“I played the same kid in singles and doubles and he got overruled three times combined, so he was obviously making bad calls, but you just got to play with it,” Boyajian said. “You can’t change the officiating.”
But he also said one of those calls helped change the flow of his match.
“I think the turning point was when they made one of the bad calls. It calmed us down, and after that I don’t think we lost a game.”
Both Boyajian and Ahari said that the rivalry between N.C. State and North Carolina only added to the tension.
“It’s N.C. State — we want to take them down,” Ahari said. “We want to send a message to them.”
Contact the Sports Editor at sports@unc.edu.
