Back-to-back road matches were no problem for No. 18 North Carolina men’s tennis.
The Tar Heels won a 4-3 squeaker at Maryland on Friday, then continued north and dominated Boston College 6-1 on Saturday.
Against the Terrapins, UNC jumped out to a 1-0 lead after sweeping the three doubles matches, then went up 3-1 after victories by Clay Donato and Jose Hernandez.
But Maryland stormed back to tie the match at three with only UNC’s Andrew Crone and Maryland’s Mathias Sarrazin left playing on the fifth court.
The final match of the day went to a decisive third set when Crone and Sarrazin split the first two. Crone won the first set 6-3, but lost the second 6-7 in a tiebreaker.
After the third set went to 6-6 and another tiebreaker, Crone was finally able to pull out the match for both himself and the Tar Heels. His defeat of Sarrazin gave North Carolina the necessary fourth point and the win, allowing the team to avoid an upset.
Three-set matches were thProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 norm for UNC against Maryland. North Carolina freshman Jose Hernandez’s 7-6, 7-5 win over Maryland’s Jesse Kiuru was the only singles match that was decided in straight sets.
The other five all took three sets to complete, with the Terrapins taking three out of the five.
North Carolina’s Saturday afternoon match against Boston College went much more smoothly. The Tar Heels dominated play throughout, with Hernandez being the only UNC player to drop a match.
Hernandez fell to Akash Mudippi 6-3, 6-7, 0-1 on the second singles court. The match was decided through a super tiebreaker rather than a full third set.
Stefan Hardy, Brennan Boyajian and Cameron Ahari all rebounded from losses to the Terrapins with wins against the Eagles. Hardy won his match without losing a game, and Ahari dropped only one game in each set. Boyajian won his match handily as well, dispatching his opponent 6-3, 6-4.
The Tar Heels return home on Tuesday to play Wake Forest in the first game of a string of five consecutive home matches. All of North Carolina’s remaining regular-season matches are against ACC teams.
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