Men's tennis falls short of season goals, but continuing upgrade via recruiting

Assessing a 15-12 season and his second team at Clemson, men’s tennis coach Chuck McCuen is taking the big-picture view of sure progress and a promising future, even as he concedes that the Tigers fell short of some ambitious goals.

“Steady progress…I did a lot of reflection and a lot of journaling this year over the season,” said McCuen. “I’m always really hard on myself as a coach. The ultimate goal here at Clemson is to win championships and to go to the NCAAs. We didn’t achieve either of those goals this year, and that’s always a huge disappointment.

“It’s not only a disappointment for me and the coaching and support staff, but maybe even more for the players. I know they were disappointed because they worked very hard to try to reach some of those goals, and they came up short.”

Just short, it might be added, as the Tigers lost six matches by a score of 4-3, with four of those losses coming at the hands of top-25 opponents.

“As far as some of the good things we did, it’s another winning season, and our records continue to improve,” said McCuen. “That’s playing in what in my estimation is the hardest conference in the country. Nine out of the twelve teams in the ACC made the NCAAs in both the men’s and women’s this year. That’s the most by any one conference in the country by a good margin. The SEC was second and the Pac-10 was third.

“But it’s a privilege to compete in this conference, though it can also beat you up at times, too. The key is staying positive and learning from the things that you did during the season, and trying to improve.”

As confidence and consistency are added to competitive capability, McCuen expects a breakthrough for a team that at times seemed to relax the upper-hand.

“North Carolina comes to mind, and that was a heartbreaker,” said McCuen. “They were 14th in the country, and we had two matches on and were up in both of those, and let that one get away. Then the same at the end of the season against Virginia Tech where we were up 4-2, serving. So those sting you a little bit, but they can teach you, too.

“We had those great opportunities to seize that moment and sort of speed up the progress. Even if you weren’t expecting it, once it was in your grasp, it’s tough as a coach and a player to realize it was right there. If we’d closed some of those matches out, and had that belief, I think that might have accelerated the team’s progress by maybe another couple of years. So in that sense, you think maybe you’ve underachieved, but after I had time to reflect and look at our scorebook and last year’s results versus this year’s, I feel that we did make progress.”

Apart from that ongoing and general improvement, next year’s team can’t help but benefit from the maturation of this year’s cadre of freshmen.

“We played three freshmen this year in the starting lineup, and that’s going to pay dividends down the line,” McCuen confirmed. “They were good to rely on. Yannick Maden played one and two for us, and had a winning record in the ACC and had wins over top-100 players. As a freshman, he’s currently ranked 125 in the country. He also played No. 1 doubles for us and had wins over two teams that were top-thirty in the country.”

McCuen is also excited about his most recent recruiting class, and the caliber of student-athlete that Clemson is able to attract.

“We had another tremendous recruiting year,” said McCuen. “We signed Hunter Harrington, who’s from South Carolina and is a junior Davis Cup player for the U.S. He’s a perennial USTA national top-ten, who’s been living at the USTA training center the last two years. He’s a premier player at the world-level, and he chose Clemson, so that’s really good news.

“Ayrton Wibowo is a top-sixty player in the world in juniors, and has championship wins on the pro circuit. He’s from Indonesia and he was a very accomplished junior. He played junior Davis Cup for his country, and also played for their Davis Cup team. So here’s a guy who has world-class experience.

“He’s here on campus, and will become eligible in January. That’s exciting, especially as you add that to a young class of freshmen that really excelled this year on the court and in the classroom. They got not only playing time, but they had good records and now they’ve got that one year of valuable experience.”