Bona tennis with another stellar year

MORITZ: Bona tennis with another stellar year

04/16/2003

ST. BONAVENTURE — Michael Bates’ office is quickly getting crowded.
The first-place trophy from last week’s Atlantic 10 men’s tennis championship sits on the couch in his Reilly Center office. The trophy from the 2001 championship shares the windowsill behind his desk with a couple other awards.
It’s a nice problem for a coach.
Bates’ team won its second A-10 title in three years on Sunday. A 4-2 win over Richmond also gave Bona its second NCAA Tournament bid in a three-year span.
No other team at Bona comes close to that kind of recent success. The men’s basketball team is the only other program to make the NCAA tournament, and the Bonnies have done that once since 1978.

“I think in 2001, I was more relieved that it was over,” Bates said. “This one, I think I enjoyed it more. I liked the whole team atmosphere — the guys were so into it the whole day. Everybody wanted to win really bad.”
Only two players remain on the Bonnies’ roster from the inaugural NCAA Tournament team. But Vili Nurmi and Mikko Haulos are the team’s leaders, as well as two of its top three players.
Tuesday afternoon, several members of the men’s and women’s team watched the tape of the 2001 championship match in Bates’ office.
“I don’t think you can compare the two (championships), I think they’re different,” Bates said.
In 2001, the Bonnies were expected to win. Perennial power Virginia Tech had left the conference a year before, and Richmond was still a year away from joining the league. Bona was the best team in the A-10, the top-seeded squad in the tournament.

“We were the No. 1 seed going in, so there was a little more pressure on us,” Bates said. “We knew Tech wasn’t in the conference anymore, and we thought we should win it.”
This year, the Bonnies were still very good. But they were seeded second behind Richmond in a vastly improved league.
“I think this year was a little bit tougher,” Bates said. “The conference as a whole was tougher. There are so many good teams — you had nine teams that could possibly win it.”
As the No. 2 seed, the Bonnies knew they could win the tournament but were free of the pressure and expectations the top seed brings.
“This year, we were a two-seed — we weren’t necessarily the underdog, but Richmond was the favored team,” Bates said. “We had to play three good matches to win it, and we did it at the right time.”

The A-10 title and NCAA bid are the crown jewels in what has been a stellar spring season for the school.
The Bonnies lacrosse team is one of two remaining undefeated squads in the country. The Bona softball team is in contention for spot in the A-10 tournament, while the baseball and golf teams are having their usual solid seasons.
For an athletic department that’s been ensconced in scandal for the past month, the spring sports have been a welcome source of good news.
Over the past eight years, Bates — who will coach the Bona women’s tennis team at A-10s this weekend in College Park, Md. — has quietly built a first-rate program.
Five years ago, the Bonnies finished their season with four wins.
The next year, Haulos and Nurmi enrolled as freshmen. At the time, the Bonnies had never finished higher than fifth at A-10s.
In the past four years, Bona has placed no lower than third — with two titles.

“I never really think about (the program’s progress) too much,” Bates said. “I know we’ve come a long way and that we want to keep it going. But I told these guys when I recruited them that we could win, that we were in a conference that we can win a lot of times, and they believed in it.
“They’re the ones who put in all the work, all the time, all the effort. They stuck together as a team, and I think that was the difference. We had eight guys who all thought we could win it.”
(Brian Moritz is a sports writer for The Times Herald.)