For the second year in a row, the Lobo men's tennis team is Mountain West Conference regular season champs. The only difference is the last time around, UNM shared the title with San Diego State and Brigham Young. This year, with a perfect 5-0 record, the Lobos sit at the top alone.
Right now, the only sure thing is that UNM will go to the conference championships next week in San Diego as the No. 1 seed. Lobo head coach Alan Dils said he doesn't know yet who UNM will play in the second round, but UNM will have a bye in the first round, which he said may actually be a disadvantage. Dils said the Lobos could have used the first match to adjust to San Diego's low altitude.
"You get to play one less match, which is good, but you don't have a warm-up match," Dils said. "The other teams will have already played and become used to the altitude."
Usually, it's easy to figure the order of the tournament seedings based on regular season records. But that is not the case this time, as several MWC matches this season were canceled due to bad weather. UNM and Air Force are the only two teams that played all five matches. BYU, Utah, SDSU and UNLV each played only four. Dils said this would have a huge impact on the seedings.
"In my opinion, UNLV is probably the fourth-best team," he said. "But they may go in as the No. 2 seed. You'd like to see all the teams play. That's the only sure way to take away any speculation, but we can't sit there and be obsessed with 'this team should be here, and this team should be here."
UNM senior Divan Coetzee said the Lobos are extremely confident going into the championships, riding a seven-game winning streak. Coetzee said the team is playing better now than they have all season.
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"We went through a rough patch at the beginning of the year," he said. "We had some pretty hard matches and we were able to pull through some close ones. We managed to play San Diego State here. They're one of our toughest opponents, and we were able to pull out a win."
Coetzee said beating SDSU and BYU was a huge confidence booster, and he feels like he is just starting to play his best tennis.
"It's probably playing outside," he said. "In South Africa, that's all we do. So outdoors I always play better."
The MWC championships will get under way April 29 in San Diego.
