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March 2, 2007

In the first edition of the Illini Big Ten Journal, sophomore Marc Spicijaric will catch up the fans as to what has happened to this point with the Illinois men's tennis team.

The tennis team started off the New Year with an awesome trip down to Florida. We all had a blast and it gave all of us an opportunity to get to know our walk-on freshman Jordan Knue. As a team, we all have our nicknames for each other, and our trip to Florida gave us a chance to come up with some for Jordan. To start off, "Silk", "The Danian", "J man", "Silky' and "Smalls", just to name a few. We developed the name "Smalls" because of one of Jordan's many funny comments. We somehow started talking about dunking a basketball, which he claimed he could. Jordan said the only problem is he can't palm a basketball, and then proceeded to say that he is a big guy but his hands are small, hence "Smalls".

We stayed at a beach house with an amazing view and the ocean 40-feet away from our back porch. Tennis wise, it gave us an opportunity to get a lot of matches under our belts and get back into the mode of competing. The Florida trip was a ton of fun and it was great to spend time with all the guys after a long break from them for Christmas.

Something you might not know about our coach, Brad, is for some reason he got into yoga over break and started doing some maneuvers on the beach when he thought we weren't watching. In fact, we saw everything and started to mimic him. Everyone on the team agrees that we have better yoga technique than Brad because we have such nimble bodies.

Starting school after a long break such as Christmas always is tough and it takes everyone a little time to get back into the swing of things, especially with school and tennis. It's hard having to wake up early for classes or morning workouts after being able to relax during break.

Playing matches in practice or at an invitational are completely different than playing a dual match in front of the Atkins crowd. Our opening match was against defending national champion Pepperdine. The atmosphere was electrifying and everybody came out fired up and ready to play. We took care of business and showed the defending champs what Illinois tennis is all about.

So far, our schedule has probably been the toughest in the nation for our first 10 matches. We played a hand full of top-10 teams and only two teams outside the top 20. We feel like we got off to a decent start and learned where we could improve at indoors. We are feeling very confident going into the Big Ten season and have high hopes for the end of the year. Overall, we plan on taking it one match at a time. That is it for now ...

Until next week,

Marc "Mr. Clutch" Spicijaric