The men's tennis team is taking turns writing the blog this season, and senior Geoff Hernandez checks in with the inaugural entry!!Be sure to bookmark portlandpilots.com/MTENblog and follow the Pilots all season long.
This is senior Geoff Hernandez and the pressure has been put on me to set the standard for the first ever Men’s Tennis blog and it seems like the right time for it to be happening. We have a lot of great matches and opportunities coming up and, as a whole, we are very confident that we can do some damage to the unsuspecting teams in the WCC. But that’s all in the future. I want to update you on what’s going on in the orange tin building, the L.P.T.C!
So far we have started the season off 4-0 and have already taken down a nationally ranked team. The Idaho Vandals were ranked 56 in the NCAA before we grinded them down 5-2. If you don’t know the scoring for college tennis, the first team to win 4 matches wins but the best way for you to learn is to come out and watch us take on some of the better teams on the West Coast! Let’s face it; everyone has a lot more free time now that Megavideo has been shut down! Devastating…
The thing I love about this team is that you couldn’t have a more international group than what we have right now. The Pilots men’s tennis team is representing Spain, Brazil, Macedonia, China/Peru (long story), 3 Canadian boys (we dominate) and uhhh well there’s Jacko [Jackson Martin] from Salem holding up the American front for all of you. But with all great things there are flaws. Our team… language barriers. The mispronunciation of words has really provided some of the funnier moments on our trips. Whether it is our Brazilian senior Daniel [Coelho] cheering for “Poland” rather than “Portland” or our Spaniard Alex butchering every top 40 song you can imagine; the L.P.T.C has becoming the UP melting pot.
There are plenty of perks with having an international squad. For example, watching your teammates throw a football around can be quite priceless when it takes a solid 15 minutes to see a spiral thrown. Watching the Super Bowl is a whole new experience when you have people cheering for FC Barcelona and asking what a first down is (this actually happens). But my favorite thing is when Alex [Ferrero], Daniel, and our assistant coach Henry (a true Argentinean at heart) argue on who the best soccer player is. This is an argument that will never go away; it starts slowly in English and progresses into a whirlwind of Spanish curse words adding style points for us “outsiders.”
From what I have gathered it is impossible to convince a Brazilian that Pele is not the greatest man to walk the earth and this die hard conviction stays just as strong for the argentines when they argue about Maradona. We sometimes try to bring Landon Donovan into the equation but the reply is consistently “Who?” However, staying true to his character and standing up for the rest of the team Jacko normally jumps in and yells “This is AMUURICA!” ultimately putting an end to the “debate.”
In all seriousness this is a team that is extremely close and I can only say these things for that simple reason. We all chose UP for our own reasons but we all love to battle on the court, and we want everyone to come out and be there to support this team. We have a great match against Gonzaga this Friday at 1 pm [
Match preview found here]! So come out and get loud and nasty because that’s what we want. This isn’t Wimbledon, we want the crowd to be one-sided!
“Let’s go Poooland!”
Keep checking in to see how we are doing!
-Geoff, a.k.a, LM (Little Man)
