Results
BALTIMORE — The good news for Elizabethtown College's men's tennis team was that their body of work throughout the season and a conference championship kept them from one of the pigtail first round matches in this year's NCAA Division III Tournament. The flip side was running up against the 13th-ranked team in the country in Johns Hopkins in the Second Round. Hopkins used its skill and the comfort of its home courts to defeat E-town 5-0 Saturday afternoon, thus ending the E-town Blue Jays season at 13-7.
Hopkins (18-4) showed just how deep it could go into its roster in doubles play. The JHU Blue Jays used an astounding 29 player combinations during the 2011-12 season. Their No. 3 set of Tanner Brown and Erik Lim took eight of nine games from Elizabethtown's (13-7) Billy Freitag and Cole Turula for an 8-1 win and a 1-0 lead.
Second doubles went to Johns Hopkins, too, by the same 8-1 score. Andy Hersh and Jeff Kamei led the Baltimore-based Blue Jays past Josh Riehl and Eric Fritzges. Juniors Riehl and Fritzges had their nine-match winning streak snapped, finishing the season 18-5 overall and 16-4 in duals.
E-town's flight one doules team of Commonwealth Conference Player of the Year Manrique Arrea and All-Commonwealth Conference Second Team member Paul Whitman gave Jacob Barnaby and Warren Elgort of JHU quite a battle before falling 8-4, as Hopkins swept doubles to take control of the match, 3-0.
Barnaby and Elgort are the third-ranked doubles pair in the latest ITA Atlantic South Region rankings, but they could not break away from Arrea and Whitman for a better part of the match. With the win, the JHU combo improved to a team-best 10-3 on the year.
The JHU Blue Jays had the backing of experience on their side and it showed all day. Hopkins had already faced seven nationally-ranked teams this season and advanced to the Sweet 16 for the fourth year in a row.
All six JHU singles players took their respective first sets. Lim swept both sets at No. 6 against E-town's Cole Turula, inching his Blue Jays one step closer to the next round. Lim's victory was his 15th of the year and seventh straight in singles play.
Elizabethtown's tournament appearance came to a close when JHU No. 2 Tanner Brown, the No. 7 singles player in the ITA's Atlantic South Region rankings, beat Riehl, 6-0, 6-0.
The visiting Blue Jays, in just their second NCAA Tournament in program history, did all they could to stay with their battle-tested counterparts. Whitman took two games from JHU's Jason Reiter at No. 4 singles in their opening set and had a 1-0 lead in the second when play was stopped. Fritzges also won a pair of games in the first set against Ben Hwang at No. 3.
Arrea was facing the third-ranked singles player in the region in Hersh (18-8), and the E-town senior did steal a game from him in the first set. Arrea's storied Blue Jay career ends with a school-record 116 wins (singles and doubles). He stands as the all-time leader in singles wins with 63 and ranks second in doubles victories with 53. Arrea was a four-time All-CC First Team pick and three-time CC Player of the Year.
Elizabethtown fell to 0-2 in its NCAA Tournament history with the defeat. Hopkins, also ranked second in the ITA Atlantic South team rankings, moves on to the round of 16 where it will face the winner of Saturday afternoon's Middlebury/Grove City match.