As sunny weather swept through Happy Valley Tuesday afternoon, the No. 44 Penn State men's tennis team took practice outdoors to the Sarni Tennis Center for one of the first times this spring.
While the Nittany Lions already played outside sparingly during the ITA Kickoff Weekend in February and their match last Tuesday against Coastal Carolina, the team can now begin to think about playing outdoors regularly with the arrival of warmer weather.
The move outside serves as good practice for this weekend's Blue-Gray National Tennis Classic, which starts today in Montgomery, Ala. The 11-1 Lions will face some of their toughest competition of the season.
The 16-team tournament field includes an array of nationally ranked squads including Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Fresno State. Penn State opens tournament play at 4:30 p.m. against Oklahoma State.
Head coach Todd Doebler is looking forward to seeing how his team performs with some of the minor changes outdoor competition brings.
Doebler believes fitness is more important outdoors because points tend to last longer and it's easier to wear opponents down when the game goes outside.
Penn State has notched nine of its 11 wins at the Indoor Tennis Facility and is 2-1 in outdoor matches, a fact Doebler thinks makes it hard to say which setting the Lions are better suited for at this point.
"We've been playing well inside and outdoors," Doebler said. "We've played some really good matches here against Princeton, Cornell, Maryland and Purdue, and I think we played good matches outside against Georgia Tech, Furman and Coastal Carolina. I think we're pretty much equal both places."
The Lions head south on the heels of two big wins: a 6-1 victory over Purdue to open the Big Ten season March 6 and a 7-0 triumph at Coastal Carolina Tuesday in which Penn State didn't drop a set in singles.
Penn State's 11-1 mark matches the team-best start of 2006, when the Lions finished 17-7 and lost to Washington in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Assistant coach Brendan Lynch was a member of that 2006 team but feels the 2010 team has forged its own identity on the way to the fast start.
"It's the hardest working team either one of us [Lynch or Doebler] have been a part of," Lynch said. "That's a huge part of it. You could argue if this is maybe not the most talented [team] or something like that, but in terms of work ethic, it's definitely the top one."
