The Cerritos College men’s tennis team stood their ground for a home exhibition match against Hope International University where they won 5-2.
The Falcons played two matches of doubles, and played five matches of singles on Tuesday.
Being that this is an exhibition match, it gives an opportunity for coach Quinn to see where his team is at in terms of readiness for the start of the season on Jan. 30.
The doubles matches for the exhibition were split with one loss and one win for Cerritos College.
The winners for the doubles match were freshman Kent Hunter and sophomore Kwangeun Lee who won the match 8-3.
This was their first time performing together against actual opponents.
“I give a lot of the credit to Kent though, because, man, Kent hits the ball so hard. When he hits it hard I don’t need to do much, I just need to predict where the opponent is going to hit it, and then, boom, we win.” said Lee.
Lee continued, “In a good doubles duo, there’s one guy who’s like really good and the other guy who supports what he does. I think Kent and I have really good chemistry there. I support him really well.”
Men’s tennis hopes to improve their doubles this season. According to Quinn, the team has some technical and strategic aspects to continue to work on. He believes the team can make their biggest leap during the season in their doubles skills.
Referring to the teams of two, Quinn said, “There not 100% set, yet. I saw some good things, and saw some things that I might wanna change, but nothing is set in stone.” [sic]
The men’s tennis team played five individual singles matches winning four and only losing one. The individual winners were sophomores Biel Roca Carreras, Lee and freshmen Hunter and Victor Castro. The loss belonging to Marcos Paulo Silvestre.
“I would say I played at my level. I didn’t play exceptional, I didn’t play like trash. Just a normal game, but I feel like I’m lacking a lot on my conditioning. I got way too tired at the end. I’m happy I got the win,” said Lee. He won the match 6-0 and 7-5.
Carreras also won his singles match 7-5 and 6-4. He said, “It was pretty difficult, because we’re getting in shape. It’s the start of the season so we have to practice more hours.”
Silvestre reflected on his performance in a very close match which resulted in a loss. The scores were 2-6, 6-0 and 3-6. He said, “I think my performance wasn’t that good. I [had a] really good three weeks of practice–today was [just] one of those days.”
Silvestre is working to improve on a variety of things this season. “I already spoke with coach about it… to move my feet more, get a little bit fit, get faster on the court. I think my mentality was okay during the match. I went through really bad moments and I handled them very well,” said Silvestre.
Everything is new this season and the team is starting to adjust. The coach “likes to bring us tactical things. It’s something that I love since I was a kid. I always liked coaches who go inside your mind and make you think about another thing, not only the basic things,” [sic] Silvestre highlighted.
Coming into the season the team has many common goals that they’d like to achieve within conference, which includes: going into the state conferences and winning it all.
Quinn said, coming in just before the start of the season, the team has established a few goals: “I’m hoping we can win state, we have really solid teams, both in the men’s and women’s, so if we can have two state titles that would be awesome.
Helping sophomores transfer out and “get into a 4 year university [of their choice], that’s a big goal. Continue the pipeline of some of the recruits that we have and continue to reach out to some players that these guys know.”
The Falcons have their next match on Jan. 30 at home against Santa Barbara. This will be their first game of the regular season.
