Dear Lobo Tennis Fans,
It’s that time of the month again where I am ready to update you with all the on-goings within Lobo tennis in the last month. We have our first weekend off of our young season this weekend and we are taking some time to get our bodies and minds healthy and get ready to go again for our home stretch that we have coming up. Our guys have been fantastic on the road so far this year. We have wins over big tennis programs like Michigan State University, Drake University and University of the Pacific. With this year’s team, the exciting part is that the best is still yet to come, whether it be unlucky bouts of flu or some small injuries we have only had all 8 guys available for 2 of our matches thus far. That means this next two weeks are all about health and tennis improvement, and we are working hard in the training room and on the court to be a better group come our next match.
As I mentioned above, we have a pretty significant home stretch coming up. We have two fantastic matches next weekend, starting with the University of Utah on Friday, February 23rd at 3pm and followed by a match against UCSB on Sunday, February 25th at noon. I have so much respect for both of these programs, and last year these were two of our most exciting road matches of the year, beating Utah 4-3 in a nail biter in Salt Lake City, coming down to the last match. We lost to UCSB 4-3 in an equally entertaining contest in Santa Barbara, which also came down to the wire. It’s great to be able to bring this level of tennis to Albuquerque. I believe Utah and UCSB will be nationally ranked when its all said and done, so hopefully we can spread the word and have plenty of you join us at The McKinnon Family Tennis Stadium to watch the matches unfold. Both teams have some high level competitors on their lineups, so it should be an exciting spectacle. Following that we host our annual Mountain Pacific Tournament on March 2nd and 3rd; we actually co-host this event with the University of Pacific and we alternate years between here and Stockton. We have a great field this year, and there will be more information released on this event as we get closer and rankings and seedings become clearer.
I am thrilled with the development of our group of guys so far this year, Bart Van Leijsen and Ricky Hernandez Tong have really stepped into the leadership roles and are mentoring our young men on what it means to be able to play at the highest level in college tennis. As always, the spring is a process of learning and peaking at the right times and these young men are fully bought in and are learning every week. There has been, and will be, a few bumps in the road. Every team gets them, but this group is resilient and talented and I have the upmost faith in them that we will be battle-hardened and ready for anything when our conference schedule rolls around.
I want to thank all of our supporters for your continued support; this team can only operate each year at such a high standard because of your support. We have repeat supporters every year, many of which don’t want any recognition, but without you we couldn’t do this. You know who you are and you are so valuable to UNM Men’s Tennis. Our alumni is really starting to activate and get behind this group, we also thank you so much, seeing so many of you at the alumni match was fantastic once again.
I will try to keep the updates coming this spring. I get lots of questions from our tennis community about how you can help us the most. I respond in two ways: The first is to come and watch our student athletes play whenever and wherever you can (hopefully at our next home match). Secondly, if you were in a position to help us financially, it would have a tremendous impact on our program and the student athletes experience this season and in the coming years. I wanted to send out the online portal for people to make donations directly to our budget if anyone is interested in helping out our program. Any donation made to our baseline club would go directly to providing our student athletes with an enhanced experience in our 2017-18 season. Our “baseline club” information can be found here: https://www.unmfund.org/fund/mtennis/
As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at bdunbar@unm.edu. I am always happy to hear from our community.
Go Lobos!
Ben Dunbar
Head Men’s Tennis Coach
The University of New Mexico (’12)
#GOLOBOS
bdunbar@unm.edu
Mailing Address:
Ben Dunbar – Men’s Tennis
The University of New Mexico Lobos
Colleen J. Maloof Administration Building
1 University of New Mexico
MSC04 2680
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001