Bohls: As NCAAs continue, Texas tennis team bonds to cement its No. 1 ranking

• Texas head coach Bruce Berque borrowed a page from Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer to inspire his No. 1 ranked Longhorns men's tennis team.
• The Longhorns won the doubles point and singles matches at No. 3, 4 and 5 to advance past Pepperdine on Sunday.
• Eliot Spizzirri, the No. 1 singles player in the nation, won in doubles, and three others including Cleeve Harper captured singles points to win by a 4-0 margin.

Bruce Berque isn’t ashamed to admit it. He has borrowed from Urban Meyer.

And that, quite frankly, is a huge admission because Berque’s a Michigan man.

Ex-Michigan man, to be technical, as a former tennis coach of the Wolverines for 11 years and now the head coach at Texas, but still. It’s quite the confession for any Michigander to suggest anything good could come from someone from that school down south.

Berque, you see, is a man who appreciates a good theme for his team to rally around, even if it does come from a former Buckeyes football coach.

“Urban Meyer has this thing called BCD, which is what players and athletes do on losing teams with losing cultures,” Berque said Sunday. “They blame, complain and defend. Yeah. And so I flipped that a little bit. I made our theme BCT.”

Accordingly, the fifth-year Longhorns coach shifted the terminology a bit to give it a more positive spin, starting with being Bold.

“Fortune favors the bold if we accomplish something special and we go for it,” he said. “Challenge, which means we have to choose challenge with every obstacle that comes up instead of the opposite response. And then T is for team because everything we do and the way we carry ourselves are going to have an impact on our team.”

Working out so far although their latest opponent certainly made Texas work for it.

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Closing out Pepperdine together

Berque’s team is 24-3 and No. 1 in college tennis, a lofty ranking the Longhorns represented well in Sunday afternoon's 4-0 victory over No. 32 Pepperdine at the Texas Tennis Center to clinch a berth in the NCAA Tournament's round of 16.

The Longhorns rode a doubles victory with singles wins from No. 3 Micah Braswell, No. 4 Siem Woldeab and No. 5 Cleeve Harper to take down a talented Waves team that Berque said “is much better than their ranking.” They showed that when the West Coast Conference club was leading two of the remaining three singles matches with the third all squared when Texas sewed it up with the necessary four points.

Pepperdine gave Texas fits on a windy, overcast day in front of 1,000 fans to advance to a match with No. 16 North Carolina this coming weekend in what will be the Longhorns’ final home contest of the year.

In truth, the home crowd was a little sedate Sunday, maybe Berque said because Texas jumped on top early 3-0 and the fans “could have felt a false sense of security.”

The players certainly don’t.

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They have taken to heart their coach’s heartfelt message. Eliot Spizzirri, the No. 1 player in college tennis and one with serious pro aspirations, has said he feels this team has a tighter bond than any other in the country, no matter the sport.

His teammates don’t disagree. Heck, eight of them live in the Waterloo apartment complex side by side.

“It’s all about sticking together as a team, which is something we’re really good at because we’re super close,” Harper said.

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They do everything together besides winning together. They even pair up with accountability partners on the court.

They bowl together, throw darts together, cook together. They go paddle boarding and kayaking on Lake Austin and Lady Bird Lake together. They watch movies and Netflix together.

“We’re always together,” said Harper, a Canadian-born hockey fan who may be the heart and soul of this team as well as last year’s NCAA doubles champion with Richard Ciamarra. The pair lost just one set in five NCAA matches. “I’m pretty good at darts.”

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This current group of eight watches NBA playoffs and the NHL postseason together. Chih Chi Huang and Pierre-Yves Bailly are hardcore Warrior fans while Woldeab, who hails from San Diego, can’t get enough of his Lakers. They leave most of the cooking to Woldeab.

“Chih is a very good cook,” Spizzirri said. “I’ll give him the prize for best steaks. But I make a pretty mean steak, too. I just don’t want to burst his bubble.”

Nobody’s really burst the Longhorns’ bubble in this magical season in which they’ve split four matches with No. 2 TCU and lost to No. 3 Ohio State. And when they do lose, look out.

Texas is hardly a one-man team

After they fell to the Buckeyes 4-0 on Feb. 5 — the only time the Horns haven’t been competitive this season — they won their next five matches, including a rematch. When TCU got the best of Texas, the Horns responded with a vengeance, rattling off 12 straight wins, including a big win over the Frogs in Fort Worth and in Austin.

Texas hopes to go much further than the quarterfinals. With sights set on the school’s second national championship and first since 2019 when Berque won the job with a promotion from assistant, the Longhorns bring a whole lot to the table. And not just Spizzirri. This is no one-man team.

In fact, Spizzirri has struggled at times. 

On Sunday, he and doubles partner Harper breezed to a 6-3 victory along with a 6-4 triumph by Huang and Evin McDonald to take the first team point. But Spizzirri sputtered at times in his singles duel with Pepperdine lefty Tim Zeitvogel, slicing at every chance and providing very little pace. In fact, he was broken in his first two service games of the contest and dropped 13 of the first 16 points as he fell behind 3-0. No problem.

The unshakable junior from Greenwich, Conn., rattled off six straight games to take the opening set, then battled back and forth before losing the second 5-7. Not that it mattered.

His teammates more than picked him up before the start of his third set.

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“There’s a lot more depth in college tennis than there was 10, 20 years ago,” Berque said. “If you’re (ranked) between 10 and 30, you’re pretty tough. But we’re pretty consistent. I don’t feel like we have any holes in our lineup.”

And that’s the beauty of this team.

As strong as Spizzirri is — he’s won 10 straight matches that concluded — Texas has a wealth of talent. 

And it’s just now getting back at full strength a player whose strokes may rival Spizzirri. Braswell, the 2021 Big 12 freshman of the year, once beat defending NCAA champion Sam Riffice in the ITA Indoors and is just now rebounding from a December knee injury that has held him back.

So, too, is No. 2 singles player Bailly grappling with a knee injury. He sat out the singles in Texas’ 4-0 win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on Saturday to save himself for Pepperdine as Berque tries to let him mend without too much stress.

Get those two back healthy, and Texas has a beast of a team, not just a very strong one that is one of maybe five or six that could win it all in Orlando later this month.

Could Braswell be the team’s No. 1 singles player as he was last year when Spizzirri was dealing with a severe wrist injury for over a year? After all, he even won a $25,000 tournament in the fall.

“I would still give Eliot that because he’s got more skills than Micah does,” Berque said. “So I would give the nod to Eliott at his best, but it might not be a big gap.”

Not that Texas is looking ahead. It’s full of confidence after a season in which it’s gone 6-3 against top 10 competition and prime wins over TCU and Ohio State.

“I wouldn’t say that’s old news,” Berque said, “but we’re on to the next challenge.”