The Case Western Reserve University Spartans men’s tennis team is officially in season.

The team, comprised mostly of third-year students, is getting off to a solid start after a commanding win in Oberlin College, with a competition score tally of 7-2 at the end of the day. The victory helped the team to show its promise that it has this season, and they will hopefully see their success continue into Friday, Feb. 19, as the Spartans face off against University Athletic Association rival, the Washington University in St. Louis Bears.

The Spartans started out their match against Oberlin with two of the three doubles matches going to the old gray and blue. Fourth-year students CJ Krimball and Louis Stuerke beat Oberlin’s Ian Paik and Jeremy Lichtmacher by a margin of 8-5 to start the doubles. The next double match was dropped as Oberlin’s Callan Louis and Abraham Davis defeated Spartan third-year students Adam Collins and Freddy Daum 8-4. With the tally tied at one apiece, third-year students James Fojtasek and Phil Gruber won the third set of doubles against Robert Gittings and Michael Drougas, giving CWRU the lead in the tally—a lead that persisted throughout the rest of the day.

As the games shifted into singles, the Spartans began to take a commanding lead in the tally against Oberlin, winning most of their matchups by commanding margins. Krimball again won a point for the tally when he again defeated Paik 6-1 and again 6-2. As first-year student Tyler Holsopple put it, this match was “seemingly smooth sailing the whole time.”

This sort of winning style kept going throughout the remaining courts, except once.

Despite this winning day, the Spartan lineup is probably still going to undergo plenty of switches. According to Holsopple, “Lots of the players can beat one guy higher and can still lose to a guy lower on the lineup, so figuring out where players should play is challenging.”

It will be interesting to see how these players end up fitting best.

This year is off to an exciting start, and the team is already looking at some big hopes. Holsopple has aspirations of going all the way and has some promising words for the season: “On the off season we did a fantastic job of working on team unity and chemistry so now that that has been established, I think what we need to focus in on is applying this team bond to our team’s confidence of winning a championship this season.”

Keep an eye on this Spartan tennis squad as the wins look to start piling up from this great 1-0 start.