Virginia men’s tennis beats Kentucky and wins the NCAA Championsip

In dominant fashion, Virginia Cavaliers’ men’s tennis team took home its 5th NCAA Championship by beating Kentucky 4-0 and underscoring an incredibly dominant season where the ‘Hoos won 22 straight matches after struggling throughout February.

Virginia started the match strong by winning the doubles point as the team of Ryan Goetz and Inaki Montes won 6-3 and Gianni Ross and Jeffrey Von Der Schulenburg won their match 6-1. That put the Wahoos up 1-0 and set them up nicely, only needing to win three of the six singles matches to take the title.

They would do so easily, winning the first three matches to finish and doing so all in straight sets. Bar Botzer got the singles victories started for UVA by winning against Kentucky’s JJ Mercer, 6-1 and 6-1. Montes won the second singles point for the Wahoos by beating Gabriel Diallo 6-2 in the first set and 6-2 once again in the second set.

With both Gianni Ross and Ryan Goetz in position two win the deciding match after they also won their respective first set, Ross closed things out for UVA over Francois Musitelli. He won his two sets in identical fashion, 6-2 in the first and 6-2 once again in the second.

That meant that, just as Virginia did against the SEC’s Tennessee in the semifinals on Saturday, UVA handled Kentucky 4-0 in the National Championship, winning the program’s 5th title in ten seasons and take home Virginia’s 31st team national championship all time.

After the program established its dominance in the sport with titles in 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017, there was a lull after head coach Brian Boland left the team to head up player development with USTA. Astonishingly, new head coach Andres Pedroso has brought UVA back to the mountain top.