The UCLA men’s tennis team won the national championship last season.
So now, as national champions, they can expect more and more fans to come out and watch them compete, right?
“No, not necessarily,” coach Billy Martin said. “I think I’m pretty realistic with that.”
It’s a sentiment echoed over and over again, always with a bit of disappointment and a bit of resignation.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect a lot more people coming out,” junior Benjamin Kohlloeffel said.
But such is the nature of the beast. At a school like UCLA, in a city like Los Angeles, tennis is pushed pretty far back in the collective consciousness of sports fans.
And though Martin expects at least 1,500 fans today when the No. 8 Bruins (9-3) host No. 23 USC (6-4), other matches – such as Saturday’s 6-1 victory over Arizona State – draw only a couple hundred.
Those matches can sometimes be the most difficult to play, though, because they require the most self-motivation.
“If you lose, nobody is watching,” redshirt junior Chris Surapol said. “If you win, still nobody is watching. It’s a bad habit to get into, but still it’s going to happen. It feels pointless.”
The opposite, then, is also true.
“When you see a lot of people in the stands, it feels like the match means something,” Surapol said. “If there are a lot of people watching, there’s no way you can come out flat.”
That’s why the team’s members assume a sort of dual responsibility – player and promoter. It seems that if they want fans to show up, they have to do their part to get the word out.
Junior Philipp Gruendler created an event on Facebook to advertise the biggest match of the young season. Surapol tells his friends to tell their friends.
Martin will target this match against USC, along with the Bruins’ home matches against Baylor and Stanford this season, as the matches he really wants for fans to attend.
It’s all about creating an environment, an atmosphere in which it is enjoyable to compete. Matches like today’s crosstown clash are always emotional and hard-fought, and a passionate crowd makes it that much better.
“It’s a good atmosphere,” Kohlloeffel said of UCLA-USC matches. “It’s a little more intense, and that’s what you need. That’s what you gain your strength from, when you have those kinds of matches and you have to compete in that kind of situation. That’s what the NCAAs are like.”
When Kohlloeffel speaks about what the NCAAs are like, he knows. He won all of his singles matches in last year’s NCAA Tournament en route to the team title, UCLA’s first since 1984.
The Trojans, meanwhile, were bounced in the second round of last year’s tournament.
But it’s a new year, and every time these teams meet, anything can happen.
Just last season the Trojans scored a 5-2 upset victory in the first meeting between the teams, a loss that had the Bruins stinging for months.
“Everybody will be juiced up,” Martin said. “I’m never too worried ever for a USC match. If you can’t get up for a USC match, if the crowd when you step out there doesn’t get you feeling ready to play – boy, maybe sports aren’t for you.”
Though USC has lost four times this season, three of those have come to teams ranked in the top 20. The Trojans have also been without junior Jamil Al-Agba, the team’s No. 1 player, who has yet to play a singles match this season because he is still recovering from a stress fracture he suffered in the fall.
The Bruins, meanwhile, have won three straight after a tough 4-3 defeat to No. 1 Georgia at the USTA/ITA National Team Indoors. All of the Bruins’ losses this season have been by a 4-3 margin, to teams ranked in the top 10.
“We can battle with anyone,” Gruendler said. “We can be right there again.”
And they expect fans to be right there for them when they take the courts today.
“It’ll be a good match for sure, and it’s going to be loud,” Surapol said. “It’s going to be intense. Every time we play them, you win a point, we’re yelling at them, they’re yelling at us. It usually reflects back to the crowd because they have an obnoxious crowd, and we can too. We showed it last year (in a 5-2 victory at home) and it definitely helped.”
But the true test will be whether fans continue to show up after Tuesday, whether they continue to vocally support the last team to win an NCAA title for UCLA.
There are certainly problems that must be overcome.
Because the team plays in the massive Los Angeles Tennis Center, fans aren’t concentrated, so it never gets really loud.
Kohlloeffel feels the etiquette involved with tennis may keep people away.
Furthermore, students walking up Bruin Walk will generally peek in free of charge, but they won’t stay.
The realist in Martin says it’s probably never going to change.
“Unless the department really wants to absolutely market us, and that’s not going to happen for a while,” he said.
“You need help to market it and get it out there, and I don’t think by any means we’re the priority. We might be really at the bottom of the totem pole.”
Unfortunately, Facebook may be the best option.
“For USC it’s always special, and you can use the famous Facebook now,” Gruendler said. “Just create an event and see who’s coming. We’ll see how it goes.”