Although the sun has been shining on Happy Valley this past week, the No. 54 Penn State men's tennis team held its Wednesday practice indoors before heading on its weekend road trip yesterday.
The Nittany Lions (13-3, 3-3 Big Ten) practiced inside the Penn State Indoor Tennis Center to prepare to take on No. 39 Minnesota at 7:30 tonight indoors at the Gophers' Baseline Tennis Center.
The Lions will then travel to Iowa for an 11 a.m. match Sunday against the Hawkeyes (5-10, 0-6).
"They are a good, hard team to beat," junior Brad Hunter said of Minnesota. "They enjoy playing indoors and play most of their matches indoors. They have a great home court advantage, from what I remember, their fans are pretty raucous.
"We've played at tough places before, just like [winning 4-3] at Virginia Tech."
While the Lions are in pursuit of a school-record finish in the conference, all signs show that they are totally focused on their match with the Gophers (11-9, 5-1).
"Right now we're not even thinking about Iowa," senior co-captain Malcolm Scatliffe said.
This one-step-at-a-time approach to their matches could see the Lions finish this spring like they did last year, going 3-1 or better. A key win in last spring's campaign was a 5-2 defeat of Minnesota, though that match was played at home for Penn State.
For tonight's match, the Lions must deal with playing a higher-ranked opponent on the road. Scatliffe said the team hopes to get off to a better start than it did last weekend at home against No. 8 Ohio State. In the 5-2 loss, the Lions dropped the doubles point and went on to lose all six of their first sets in singles.
"We've got to control the things we can control," Penn State head coach Bill Potoczny said. "A team as good a Minnesota, we're not going to stop them from doing some things that they want to do.
"It's the fundamentals; we need to serve and return well and play with speed -- the same things we've needed to do all year. We can't just do most of those things, we've got to do them all."
Along with doing the little things, the indoor practice could even help with an Iowa team that Potoczny called "brutally quick," if they had to play them inside.
A weekend sweep would not be out of the question and would tie the Lions' five conference-wins mark, putting them in position to close out their season with a new record.
Right now, though, none on the team is looking that far ahead.
"We look at all the matches the same, it doesn't matter who we play," Scatliffe said. "It all comes down to the doubles point, if we can get that, then we just need four points, which we can do."
