“I was kind of talking to myself, saying, ‘OK, I got a little more work to do than usual down here by myself,”https://floridagators.com/” Stump recalled. “But then I looked at our players.”
This is what he saw:
* Court No. 6: Fifth-year senior Josh Goodger, with 42 wins since transferring to Florida from Tulsa, including a 2021 season when he went 22-0 in singles play.
* Court No. 5: Grad-transfer Mattias Siimar, who arrived last summer by way of Michigan, where he won 57 matches as a Wolverine, playing mostly at No. 3 last season, and 15-4 in his lone UF campaign.
* Court No. 4: Fifth-year senior Andy Andrade, with more singles wins (133) than any player in UF history and one of just five Gators ever to eclipse more than 200 wins in singles and doubles.
“I was looking at 15 years of college-playing experience,” Stump said.
It didn’t mean he could take the rest of the night off, but you get the point. The players on his watch weren’t going to get rattled by that moment or any other. Florida rolled through the SEC Tournament, just like it did through a perfect SEC regular season, and carried that domination through the first three rounds of NCAA tournament play by defeating New Orleans, Miami and 15th-seeded North Carolina by a combined 12-0 score.
That brings the defending national-champion Gators (26-2), seeded second overall and winners of 21 straight matches, to tonight’s showdown against seventh-seeded Virginia (25-5) in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Championships at the Khan Outdoor Tennis Complex in Champaign, Ill. UF defeated UVA 4-2 at the ITA National Team Indoor Championships on Feb. 19, but the Cavaliers have not lost a match since. They’re on a 20-match winning streak, including a perfect run through Atlantic Coast Conference regular season and postseason tournaments.
The Cavs, however, are not as deep, as experienced, nor as battle-tested as the Gators.
Nor, frankly, as talented.
Continuing the aforementioned countdown:
* Court No. 3: Fifth-year senior Duarte Vale, who played the ’21 championship season at No. 1 singles and last month moved into the program’s all-time top 10 for career wins.
* Court No. 2: Senior Sam Riffice, who merely became just the third Florida player to capture a NCAA singles crown last year, doing so five days after helping lead his team to the first national championship in program history.
* Court No. 1: Sophomore Ben Shelton, the greenest of the orange and blue front-liners, but merely the No. 2-ranked player in college tennis. Shelton, some may remember, played No. 5 singles last season and provided the championship-clinching point in the NCAA team final.
“We have a lot of the same guys, and pretty much the same team, plus everybody works so hard,” Vale said when asked to compare the ’21 champs to the ’22 championship seekers. “I like to think we’re a lot better than last year.”
Hard to fathom, considering that UF squad finished 26-2 and holding the big hardware, but it’s also hard to argue. And for one significant reason.
“We win the doubles point,” Stump said.
Like, pretty much always.
Like, 21 in a row.
“Our doubles play is miles ahead of where we were a year ago,” Florida coach Bryan Shelton said.
The last time the Gators lost a doubles point was Feb. 18 against Texas at national indoors, which was also the last time they lost a match.
Think of the psychological edge — and pressure — on a UF opponent in knowing that if it loses the doubles point (and likely will) that team has to win four of the six singles matches, against that lineup, to survive.
“It’s a nice advantage,” Shelton said.
There are no givens, of course. Florida’s dominance during its winning streak is impressive (the Gators won those 21 matches by a combined score of 107-19), but the eight teams remaining in the field — Texas Christian, UF, Baylor, Ohio State, Michigan, Tennessee, UVA and Kentucky, by their respective seeds — are the creme de la creme of the college tennis landscape; as in all eight top seeds. TCU, the No. 1 seed, defeated Florida 4-3 in both teams’ season-opening match back on Jan. 14 at Fort Worth.
The Gators are so much better now than they were then. And even more experienced. More hardened. More hungry.
“It’s a collective confidence. When you see other guys do it you tend to believe in yourself more,” Stump said. “The depth that we have built on this team has created an environment for guys believing in themselves and understanding when they take the court there’s nothing they’ll see in a match that that they haven’t seen before … and probably have seen in one of our practices.”