This past weekend, the men's tennis team hit Champaign, Ill., for its first sample of conference competition, splitting into two groups for a disappointing Big Ten Individual Championships.

"We didn't really fare all that well out there," Coach Jan Bortner said of the championship. "We had some bright spots as far as some of the individual matches, but overall as a team we were below par."

The tournament was set up in the form of a 64-player draw against all Big Ten schools for the top six seeds per team. Then a separate tournament of 32 was held for seeds seven and eight.

Chad Skorupka, Ivan Spinner and Michael Carter all won their first matches to move on to the second round of competition. However, only Spinner advanced to the third round, where he lost, 6-2, 6-1, to Jerry Truek, the tournament's 14th seed from Illinois.

"Chad Skorupka was on the top of his game," Bortner said of Skorupka's second-round match. "He put out a good, solid effort but he ran out of gas. We need to work on his conditioning level."

Spinner felt exhaustion played a part in the team's overall sluggishness.

"I didn't do do as good as I had hoped," Spinner said of his matches. "We had a real tough trip because we got stuck. We were up for 30 hours straight and that was really tough. But, as a team overall I don't think it was good performance compared to what we could have done."

In addition to Skorupka and Spinner, a disappointed Bortner has plans to work on improving the quality of play of the rest of the team.

"It was just a tournament which showed up our weaknesses," Bortner said. "And that's what were working on this week -- getting back to basics.

In only their first tournament with Big Ten teams, the Lions had to face some tough new competition.

"It was obviously a step up in terms of the caliber of competition," Bortner said. "But, it was our third weekend in a row of good tournament action and that's sort of the way we set it up. We tried to really get into the tournaments early in the year, try to play a alot of matches, get experience.

Over spring break the Nittany Lions will open their Big Ten dual mataches against Iowa and last year's Big Ten champion Minnesota. Both beat Penn State last year.

"We're going to be the underdog in both matches," Bortner said. "Minnesota won the Big Ten champioships last year and this year have a lineup that's really loaded with a lot of experience."