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Will Evans Rises to the Occasion on Home Courts


March 3, 2002 © 2002 Rob Dinerman, photos: Samper by Ron Beck, Helal by Debra Tessier, others by Vaughn Winchell — all © 2002. May not be reproduced online or in print without permission.

All Trinity Finals on the Women's Side

Top seeded Trinity No. 1 Bernardo Samper and third seed Will Evans both advanced through the quarter- and semi-final rounds yesterday afternoon and evening to reach the final round of the 2002 NISRA Individual Championships, where they will vie for the coveted Pool Trophy in match scheduled to begin at 1:30 this afternoon at host Princeton's Jadwin Gymnasium in central New Jersey.

RARE FRESHMAN OPPORTUNITY

Bernardo Samper ponders his chasers in the NISRA tourney.

Samper will attempt to become the first freshman to win this event since Marcus Cowie, also representing Trinity, accomplished the feat in '97, when he won the first of his pair of successive Individual crowns. Prior to Cowie, the last collegians to win this tourney in their freshman years were Harvard's Michael Desaulniers (in '77), Kenton Jernigan, and Adrian Ezra. Desaulniers also triumphed in his sophomore and senior years after being sidelined his junior season with a broken foot. The relentlessly attacking style with which Desaulniers blitzed the intercollegiate field a quarter-century ago in Williamstown characterizes Samper's explosive game as well, as his Saturday victims, Dennison's Javier Castilla and Princeton's defending Pool champion David Yik, both discovered first-hand during their straight-set defeats.

Castilla had defeated Tiger star Danny Rutherford in a tough four to reach the quarter-final stage, but could only muster 4, 3 and 4 points respectively in his all-Colombian top-quarter match with Samper.

Rutherford's teammate Yik entered his Samper semi riding the crest of a very fulfilling quarter-final victory over Harvard's James Bullock, who had straight-gamed him two weeks earlier in the dual meet between these two fabled schools at Cambridge. Princeton's 5-4 win that day had earned the Tigers their second Ivy League title in the past three years (all of them decided by Harvard-Princeton matches that ended with the winning varsity garnering only the five-match minimum), but Bullock's 3-0 rout of the reigning Individual champion had triggered a bout of lost confidence in his demoralized opponent, who therefore entered this weekend in general and this Bullock rematch in particular as a definite question mark.

YIK HELPS YIK
To Yik's credit, he faced down this psychological challenge and rose to the occasion magnificently. The home-court advantage and revenge factors are both major motifs in the college game, and both elements worked in his favor, as did the supportive courtside presence this afternoon of Yik's older brother Peter, who had won the 1999 and 2000 Pool events, and whose attendance always seems to bring out the best in David. After a poor first game, the younger Yik won both the second game 9-0. The third game was the key and it seesawed evenly to a tiebreaker, which Yik won 10-8 and after which his confidence grew stronger and his racquetwork, especially his patented drop shot, became sharper throughout the final fourth, which he also won 9-0.

But this momentum could not be sustained that evening against Samper, who had too many weapons and who kept Yik on the run so much of the time that the latter didn't have either the time or the positional opportunity to execute the short-court game that had served him so well in the Bullock match five hours earlier.

WILL EVANS SOARS

Will Evans uses his reach to good advantage

Although the Yik family Pool-winning streak will therefore end at three, the Tigers still will have a chance this afternoon to extend to four their team Pool-winning skein, due to the all-day Saturday heroics of New Zealand native and Princeton No. 1 Will Evans, a semi-final loser in last year's Pool competition to Trinity's Lefika Ragontse, who defeated two of Ragontse's and Samper's Bantam teammates yesterday, even though he seemed on the verge of collapse for long sections of both matches.

Evans's quarter was with Bermuda native Nickolas Kyme, who had reached that stage with round of 16 four-game win over Penn's Richard Repetto, one of only three Americans (Dartmouth's Ryan Donegan and Tiger captain Peter Kelly were the others) to reach the second round, where all three were eliminated.

Will Evans stays focused

The lanky Kiwi won the first two games over Kyme, who then followed his head coach Paul Assaiante's mid-match advice to slow the game down and play long points. This attritional tactic brought Kyme a pair of match-evening 9-2 games and ostensibly all the momentum going into the deciding fifth, but Evans reached a little deeper and, spurred on by the hometown pro-Princeton crowd, he was able to take advantage of a few early-game Kyme errors and claim the fifth game, nine points to two.

This brought Evans to his third match of the season with second-seeded British-born Trinity sophomore Michael Ferreira, who had handily won those two previous encounters (in early January in the USSRA Five-Man Team Championships and in late February in the NISRA Nine-Man Team Championships, both of which Trinity captured) and who had also defeated Yik just two weeks earlier on the same Jadwin exhibition court in the dual meet between Princeton and Trinity for the regular-season championship, which the Bantams won for the fifth straight time.

EVANS SHOWS HIS METTLE
This proved to be a real roller-coaster, with several wild swings in momentum, the first of which occurred when Ferreira let an 8-3 lead and eight total game points (including a pair in the tiebreaker) slip away to his tired-looking but dogged opponent, who rallied to an important 10-9 victory. Deflated by his inability to cash in such a sizable advantage, Ferreira never really recovered his rhythm in losing the 9-5 second and fell behind 8-2 in the third as well, the match seemingly hopelessly lost. But a daring drop nick from the court's deepest recesses got him going at the last possible moment, and he mirror-reversed the first game's fickle fortunes by saving an octet of game- and, in this case, match-points of his own and preserving the chances of an all-Trinity final with a 10-9 tally.

LEONG VS HELAL ON SHOW

Leong, the former world #2 junior, faces Helal

There WILL be an all-Trinity final this afternoon, but it will come in the women's competition, where at 12:30 today top-seeded Amina Helal will face her second-seeded teammate Lynn Leong in a match that is guaranteed to produce the first-ever Trinity female Individual Intercollegiate champion and to set the stage for a possible Trinity men's-women's "double," depending of course on the outcome of the subsequent Pool final between Samper and Evans, who grabbed an early lead in the fourth game of his Ferreira semi and never relinquished it through the 9-6 win that brought him to the final.

Whatever happens today, the guts and character Evans displayed in grinding his way through exacting quarter- and semi-final wins yesterday against some of Trinity' top guns has been the story of the tournament. Whether he can come up with one more huge effort or whether Saturday's wins exacted too much of a toll, especially given the firepower and charisma of the well-rested Samper, who hasn't lost a college match all season and didn't drop a single game in any of his four pre-final matches, will be resolved this afternoon and reviewed in these pages early tomorrow morning.

Stay tuned.

[Men's Draw]             [Women's Draw]

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