Tennis balls! Golf balls! Swimming...balls?
We've given plenty of digital ink to the surging Pack 9, and even tipped our collective caps to the national champion cheer squad, but what about the other non-revenue doings of our beloved Wolfpack student athletes? What about it, I say?
First off you have your women's tennis program, which set a school record with its sixth ACC win in Sunday's regular season finale at Boston College. The Pack rallied for a 4-3 win after losing the doubles point to finish the season at 14-10. The Pack, 38th in the latest ITA rankings, are led by junior Martina Frantova. The 5-9 Slovakian, who is ranked 51st in singles play, has posted 12 wins over ranked opponents as State's #1.
State will take on unranked Louisville in the ACC tournament Wednesday in Cary at 10 a.m. The winner gets Syracuse in the next round. The Pack downed then 24th-ranked Cuse 5-2 earlier this season in their most impressive performance. State also had a win over 27th-ranked Wake Forest.
The men's team, which is 17-13 and 5-7 in league play, also had Wake's number, dropping the 7th-ranked Deacons 4-3 back in early March. The men's overall record might not look impressive, but the team faced 17 ranked opponents on the season. They will begin ACC tournament play Thursday as the #8 seed against #9 seed and unranked Clemson in Cary. The men are ranked 42nd by the ITA. The winner gets, gulp, #1 in the nation Virginia.
The women's golf team took advantage of NCAA regional play being on their home turf last year, posting a third-place finish at Lonnie Poole to vault into the NCAA championships, where they finished 22nd. The women missed taking third in last weekend's ACC tournament by just three strokes, settling for fifth. Freshperson Naomi Ko paced the Pack with a fifth-place individual finish. Three ladies were in the top 20 of the 60-player event at Sedgefield in Greensboro. Regional play begins May 5th.
David Cooke set the three-round tournament record (-15) to give men's golf its 89th medalist in program history last weekend. State's last tournament of the regular season, the Wolfpack Spring Intercollegiate, featured 16 teams at Lonnie Poole. Cooke and Stephen Franken (-6) led the Pack to an eight-stroke win over runner-up South Florida. Virginia was a distant third, 20 strokes back. The Bulls and Hoos both have ranked programs. The men begin ACC tournament play Friday.
Finally, three Pack swimmers will try to avoid zika-carrying skeeters and political unrest when they represent their motherlands in the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this summer. Simonas Bilas will swim the 50m and 100m freestyle for Lithuania. Anton Ipsen qualified in the 400m free. Soren Dahl will swim a leg in the 4X200m freestyle relay. Ipsen and Dahl will both be representing Denmark.
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