By Rebekah Romney
The men”s tennis team dominated the matches over the weekend, beating New Mexico State, Air Force, and New Mexico.
BYU is now 2-0 in Mountain West Conference play heading into this week.
The Cougars played New Mexico State on Thursday, April 4 and won convincingly 7-0.
In doubles play, junior Carlos Lozano and senior Gert Vilms started the team off with a win. Senior Nic Losee and sophomore Erik Nyman teamed up to win the second doubles match.
Junior Jeff Olsen and freshman Jose Luis Lechuga played together for the first time and won their match also.
BYU moved on to Friday”s matches to begin conference play.
Air Force was the first team to fall to the Cougars, losing 5-2.
Lozano and Vilms won doubles and senior Jeff Harbach and Olsen followed with a win also, beating the tough Mancinelli and Rainey, 8-6.
The Cougars won one doubles match and four of the singles matches.
The Falcons had a rough weekend, losing all three of their competitions and falling to 12-8 overall, 0-5 in the conference.
On Saturday, BYU cleaned up, beating New Mexico 6-1.
“Overall, I”m happy with how we played this weekend,” Lobo coach Alan Dils said after the matches. “We fought hard in every match and we competed at a level that I like to see.”
Doubles play was much closer with Losee and Nyman pulling a point out of a tiebreaker.
Lozano and Vilms won their third match of the weekend, 8-5.
In singles play, Lozano was the only loss as Divian Coetzee pulled out the tight wins, 2-6, 6-1, and 6-4.
New Mexico was happy with the weekend as they head into the end of the season.
“I think this will give us confidence when we go into the conferment tournament,” Dils said.
Conference play will end quickly before the tournament. There is a tournament in Salt Lake City this weekend for the teams to finish up the games.
BYU will play Utah on Thursday, April 11; UNLV on Friday, April 12; and San Diego State on Saturday, April 12. All games will be on Utah”s territory.
The conference tournament will be in Las Vegas on April 25-27.
