Rebel Redemption – SEC tourney champs!

Redemption. That wasn’t all winning the Southeastern Conference Tournament last weekend was about for the Ole Miss men’s tennis team. But that was definitely part of it.

Ole Miss was the preseason pick to win the SEC overall. Early season losses to Georgia and Florida all but ended their hopes.

The Rebels won all their other regular season conference matches. So when the time came to be able to redeem themselves and prove they are the best team in the league this season, they jumped at the chance to take advantage of it.

Second-seed Ole Miss rolled past tenth-seed Kentucky, third-seed Tennessee, and fourth-seed Florida to bring home the hardware from the tourney, which this spring was held at the University of Arkansas.

“These guys had very high expectations,” Billy Chadwick, for nearly three decades the tennis coach at Ole Miss, said. “And now they are playing their best tennis.”

For Chadwick, who along with wife Julie and sons Lyon and Carr such a visible and important family of Oxford for years now, winning this trophy again had been a long time coming. The Rebels won it in 1997. They’ve been to the finals four times since then, including the most recent three.

But they hadn’t been able to win the finale, which the past two seasons featured as their competition the nation’s No. 1 ranked team at the time, Georgia.

That Florida beat top-seed Georgia last Saturday to pit the Gators against the Rebels in Sunday’s title match may or may not have been the perfect scenario for Ole Miss. But it worked out well, obviously.

Ole Miss men’s tennis has been a national power for two decades under Chadwick’s direction. Their support, from long-time Oxonians, from people who have relocated to the area, from alums who have caught on to all the winning along with the Ole Miss students who support them, has grown substantially. It’s been a fun and amazing climb to see them reach a high level of competition year after year.

Chadwick’s program is a world-wide melting pot. There’ve been players like Mississippi’s Dave Randall, an All-American and SEC champion in the late 1980s, and Mahesh Bhupathi of India, at Ole Miss in the mid-1990s and now with 40 professional titles to his credit as well as 10 Grand Slam crowns during a stellar pro career.

This year Chadwick’s program brings its past and present together. Former Ole Miss champion Alex Hartman of Sweden, an All-American here the early part of this new century, is a volunteer coach with the team. He’s part of an important and long-standing Swedish connection for Ole Miss tennis. Current full-time assistant coach Toby Hansson, an SMU alum and native of Sweden, has been with the program for two years. Chris Rea of Madison Central High in this state is a student assistant this spring after playing on the team the past few seasons.

Current team member Bram ten Berge of The Netherlands, a Classics major, was recently inducted into Phi Beta Kappa at Ole Miss. Jonas Berg of Sweden was named Most Valuable Player of the SEC Tournament last weekend.

Robbye Poole, a South Carolinian who played some years of his junior tennis career in Mississippi, is joined on the squad by Erling Tveit of Norway, Jakob Klaeson of Sweden, Matthias Wellermann of Germany, Kalle Norberg of Sweden, and Tucker Vorster of South Africa.

Tveit, the No. 1 singles and doubles player for Ole Miss currently, was recently named to the SEC Men’s Tennis Community Service Team. A native of Oslo in his home country, Tveit has been involved with the Oxford Food Pantry and with Special Olympics.

The men’s tennis program at Ole Miss is truly a window to the world, and the depth and breadth of it has become an amazing part of life in Oxford.

The program’s best finish was 1995 when Ole Miss lost to Stanford in the national championship finals played that year at the University of Georgia.

As is the case this time every year, the Rebels now wait. They wait on another NCAA Tournament bid, and they wait to be announced as a host site again for rounds one and two of an NCAA Regional Tournament. Both of those announcements come on April 29. The NCAA Regional is May 10-11. The National Championship Tournament following the Regional is in Tulsa, Okla., May 17-20.

Last week, Virginia was still the nation’s only unbeaten team at No. 1. Ohio State was No. 2, and Georgia was No. 3.

Three of the Rebels’ four losses this season are to those teams.

Their only other loss was to Florida. And as of last weekend, the Rebels certainly redeemed themselves quite nicely for all the above.

The Rebels found out this week they are now the fourth-ranked team in all of college tennis for this season. They hope to finish No. 1.

They just might do it, too.

What a program.

- Jeff Roberson

Ole Miss Spirit

Oxford, MS

(picture by Wesley Hitt)