Mister Roger's Neighborhood: March 21
UT senior Roger Gubser (Laredo, Texas) returns with his latest installment of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood after a month-long break. Roger discusses the team’s recent success, which now includes a top-five appearance in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) team rankings. Hello, fellow Longhorns! I'm back again to give you an update on our season. Our team was ranked No. 22 when you last heard from me, and now we are standing strong at No. 4! This means that our season, which is far from over, is headed in the right direction. After losing at Duke with a sub-par performance, we have bounced back to win six straight matches, including wins over then-No. 7 Virginia and No. 2 Illinois. The Virginia match was a great confidence-builder for our team. We battled to a 4-3 victory, which ended with me clinching the match against Rylan Rizza. It was a match that assistant coach Ricky (Ricardo Rubio) believes he will never forget. If you want more details on why Ricky will never forget the match, you will have to ask Ricky, as it was quite entertaining for several reasons. Virginia is a great team, and for the first time, we proved to ourselves that we can compete with any team in the country. We have since been home for a long set of home matches. We have beaten Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Tulsa, Texas-Arlington, Michigan and Illinois. The Illinois match, which we played on Friday, March 10, was an exciting 4-3 thriller. We had great support from our fans even though most students were gone on spring break. We had a crowd of about 900 at our Penick-Allison Tennis Center. It is always special to put on a show for our fans. I strongly believe that our fans were pleased with our performance and are ready to come back to watch us play. We did fall short of our great attendance goal (2000 fans), which can be partly blamed on people leaving for spring break. But, we still have many home matches left. Our team worked hard to promote our matches to the UT students for our matches against Michigan and Illinois, and we even posted fliers. I gave out several fliers to the team and told them to post them wherever they felt people would actually read them. Luis (Diaz Barriga) told me he had posted one in a great location because he said that everyone was forced to read it there. He posted a flier inside a bathroom in Jester Hall, which I thought was hilarious. He was right about people being forced to read it. I also would like you to mark your calendar to come watch us on Friday, April 14 when we play No. 2 Pepperdine. I am going to do everything possible (within the rules, of course, Rhonda) to reach our team’s attendance goal of 2,000 fans for that match. Well, we were given a few days off for spring break, which I feel re-energized us for our upcoming schedule. We did decide to come back early and begin training again because our team knows the importance of continuing to improve. We have cracked the national top five for the first time since I have been here, but we all know that to get to where we want to be, we need to work that much harder. Well, we have Texas-San Antonio scheduled on Wednesday, March 22 and Notre Dame, Texas Southern and SMU this weekend. We hope that you can come watch us play this week! Hook ‘em!
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