Unranked UC Santa Cruz Men's tennis was able to pull away with a 5-4 win over #34 ranked Cal Lutheran at the East Tennis Courts, placing them in great position to start their season.

After a delay, the match began with doubles. Cal Lu's #1 doubles secured the first point 8-3 over Andrew Tjoa and Lucas Chen.  For the #2 doubles, Cal Lu's Darvel Lossangoye and Charlie Spina barely scraped by Sarthak Saxena and David Jackson by a score of 8-6 in a close set that could have gone either way. Fortunately, the #3 doubles pair of freshmen Andre Mardirossian and Suriya Sundaram pulled away with the win in the tiebreak after defending one or two match points to put the score at 2-1.

Beginning the singles matches, freshman Chen beat CLU senior Isaiah Volk 7-6, 6-3 at #1, evening out the score. Jackson unfortunately lost to Lossangoye at #3 with scores of 6-3, 6-2. But Mardirossian followed up with a win in #2, beating Cal Lu senior Jake Haffner, evening out the score at 3-3. Tensions began to rise as this very first D3 match was very important to both teams in order to qualify for NCAAs. Senior captain Kris Harris unfortunately lost his first match back from injury at #4 singles to Spina 6-2, 6-3, which gave Cal Lutheran the lead and one more point away from winning.

#5 and #6 singles were all that were left to play. With Matt Kermin winning his match at #6 with relative ease (6-4, 6-2), the last match to determine the whole contest rested on UCSC freshman Andrew Tjoa at #5. After being a set down, things didn't look good for the Slugs as he was down in the second as well as lost the first set. But he never gave up, despite injury and fatigue. Tjoa won the second set tiebreak, and won the third set tiebreak even while his dominant hand was suffering an injury to win 3-6, 7-6, (10-7) and give the Banana Slugs the match.

"They fought their hearts out!" said head coach Jimmy Soper afterwards. "We felt like the underdog with a lot of injured players, but they gave it everything they had."