51��ɫ

The 51��ɫ men’s tennis team won its 21st consecutive Midwest Conference (MWC) Championship this spring, tying a record for the most consecutive MWC titles in any sport, set by the Monmouth College men’s indoor track and field team in 2020. 

As the MWC Conference champs, 51��ɫ earned a trip to the NCAA Division III National Tournament, where the team defeated Kalamazoo in the first round and lost to the University of Chicago in the second round.

The Streak

Defending a decades-long streak can put pressure on everyone, says Head Tennis Coach , but it also brings out the best efforts of 51��ɫ’s players. At the same time, it motivates their opponents.

“It comes up against our bigger rivals,” Hasenyager says. “They’re going to want to end the streak. They’re going to be excited to come and give us their best shot.”

After talking about tactics and strategies in the pre-match huddle, Hasenyager ends with this message to counter the pressure: “Hey, look, we’re the favorites at every single position. Go out there and be the favorites.”

It’s a theme that resonates with the players and gives them that extra confidence they need in the moment, Hasenyager says. 

He even feels the pressure himself. “That’s been one of the most stressful parts of taking this job,” he says. “I don’t want to come in and ruin this amazing streak that’s been going on for as long as a lot of these kids have been alive.” 

It’s been four years since Hasenyager became head coach, and the streak is still going strong.

Felling the Foresters

Hasenyager says Lake Forest College is 51��ɫ’s top MWC rival; his team has played the Foresters in the conference finals every year since he’s been coaching at 51��ɫ, and it’s always a challenge. 

“If we can win that one, we feel pretty good about our chances of winning the conference,” Hasenyager says.

This year, the 51��ɫ-Lake Forest rivalry was on full display in the conference finals. Hasenyager knew that the streak was on the line. If 51��ɫ didn’t win the match, the team wouldn’t go to nationals. He watched to see how his team would respond to the pressure. Would they get feisty and rise to the challenge, or would they lose their focus and play less than their best?

“We got the lead, and we won the match. It was great. But in that moment, it was stressful to be sure,” Hasenyager says. 

On to Nationals

Hasenyager wanted his team to look beyond the MWC to play at an even higher level. To help them prepare for a potential showing at the NCAA Division III National Championships, he deliberately added some nationally competitive teams to the schedule this season that would pose a major challenge to the 51��ɫ players.

Hasenyager took his team to Southern California on spring break, where they played several excellent teams, including Middlebury College (NESCAC champs), Bowdoin College (top 10 nationally), and Babson College (NCAA quarterfinalists this year), along with California schools like Pomona College and the California Institute of Technology. Hasenyager hoped this would help his players know what to expect when they reached the national tournament. 

“It was a fun, challenging experience,” he says. “I think we took the right lessons from it.”

Associate Professor of Physical Education coached tennis at 51��ɫ for 21 years from 1996 to 2016 when he left the role to become the athletic director. He says that this year’s trip to California to play some of the nation’s best teams may have hurt the team’s win-loss record a bit, but it was for a good cause. “Our players gained from the experience of playing some of the top players and top teams in the nation,” Hamilton says.

Ready for the Competition

The preparation put the 51��ɫ team in a good place when they took on Kalamazoo College in the first round of the NCAA Division III Men's Tennis Tournament in Whitewater, Wisconsin. 51��ɫ defeated Kalamazoo 4-2 in the first round of tournament play, although the Kalamazoo Hornets were ranked 56th in the national rankings, compared to 51��ɫ’s 63rd-place ranking.

Although 51��ɫ lost to the University of Chicago in the next round of the tournament, beating Kalamazoo is no small feat, Hamilton says. Kalamazoo plays in the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) Conference, where the team won 74 consecutive league titles from 1936–2012. This is the longest known conference championship streak in any sport at any level in the world, according to the Kalamazoo website. 

Hamilton says it was a major coup to come away with a victory against a storied program like Kalamazoo. “I think the victory was enabled by the fact that our players had played really strong competition and had been in tight moments, and they knew how to react,” he says. And even though 51��ɫ lost to the University of Chicago in the next round, the experience of playing at the national level could help carry the 51��ɫ team even further next year.