The Mississippi State University men’s tennis team is ready to explode into a new season after achieving unprecedented success in last year’s season.
In the 2018 season, the team won the SEC championship and advanced to the quarterfinals of the NCAA national tournament, as well as achieved many individual titles and victories.
However, the players refuse to let the success go to their heads. Nuno Borges, a senior from Maia, Portugal, who is a world-ranked, two-time All-American player, said the team is not going to rely on last season’s success. Instead, it is going to start from step one.
“We realize we’ve got to start from zero,” Borges said. “Last year was a great year, but we’ve got to start from where we started last year and work our way up, and I think we can do even better things. We’ve got to feel almost like the underdog.”
Head coach Matt Roberts agreed the team’s biggest challenges would come from last season’s success. The team plans to combat the higher expectations and pressures by focusing on executing the daily, small goals that will in turn lead to even greater accomplishment.
“You can’t think too much about the end of the road,” Roberts said. “You’ve got to focus on each day. We’ve talked about milestones a lot versus goals, and we have daily, weekly milestones for these guys that we focus on, so we eliminate the pressures of the outside.”
Trevor Foshey, a senior from St. Cloud, Florida, said the team plans to combat the urge to take it easy and assume success by focusing on starting strong, something the coaching staff is very good at facilitating.
“The biggest challenge is probably from our success last season… thinking, ‘Oh, it’s just going to happen…’ so it’s coming out with fire,” Foshey said. “Our coaches do a great job with that. We know that’s a challenge, and we’re going to take that on with all we’ve got.”
Four of the players, including Borges and Foshey, are seniors and have played together for all four years of their collegiate careers. Roberts said all the hard work they have built up provides a great outlook for the season.
“We have a lot of things we’ve built over the years established now, and it gives you a good feeling going into the season,” Roberts said.
However, Roberts also stressed this is a new year and, even after all the building they have done, there is much work left to do.
“You can look back and basically say we have the same team, but you still have to work day after day to build that,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t matter what you did last year. It’s a new season, new team, and so we just take it one day at a time, one week at a time, and just continue to get better at the things we can, and become better men.”
Foshey said spending four years together helped him and his teammates form a great bond on and off the court. They have great chemistry and know what to expect from each other, but also like to mix it up with some fun.
In addition to the many extraordinarily talented seniors, several of the younger players are showing exceptional potential, including Gregor Ramskogler, a freshman from Reichraming, Austria, who partnered with Foshey for doubles in the fall.
Borges said the main things the seniors wanted to pass on to the younger players was their fighting spirit and discipline.
“Stay close. We’re a family,” Borges said. “Work hard, fight hard, stay together. That’s all we want for the next guys representing Mississippi State.”
The MSU men’s tennis team has been placed 3rd in the ITA’s preseason ranking. Roberts said the ranking is just a number and the team will work just as hard, no matter the expectation of others.
“We know it’s just a number and that we have to prove everything,” Roberts said. “Whether we’re ranked 3 or 73, we do what we do. We compete hard. We control what we can control and let the numbers and the rankings work themselves out at the end of the year.”
This weekend, the Bulldogs will host Wichita State, Arizona and the University of North Carolina at Willmington for the ITA kickoff weekend.
