Super Senior Night

The Liberty Flames men’s tennis team faced conference rival Radford University Saturday, April 4, defeating the Highlanders 4-3.

The momentum and confidence seemed to lead the Flames to another conference win, taking their conference record to 3-3 and their overall record to 10-9.

Liberty got off to a great start, sweeping the Highlanders in all three doubles matches. On the No. 2 court, Liberty’s Jorge Azuero and senior Stan Vaughan won their match 8-3. On court three, fellow senior Shea Thomas and Guillem Secanell won their match with a score of 8-5, and on the No. 1 court, teammates Egon Samaai and Dillon Segur, who now have an overall record of 11-3, won their match 8-4 to complete the sweep.

“We got off to a really good start,” Head Coach Chris Johnson said. “We played really good doubles. We grabbed the momentum, and in really close matches, when you grab momentum, like, that it’s huge.”

The schools took a moment to honor seniors Stan Vaughan and Thomas for senior day.

The teams then went on to singles play, in which matches were extremely close all the way to the end.

Thomas led the way for the Flames, winning 6-2 in both sets over nationally ranked Nicolas Sayer. His win tied him with Giancarlo Lemmi for the second most singles wins in Liberty tennis history.

“I’ve been playing pretty well the past couple matches and hitting my shots, so I just came out there and did the same thing, and it was a big win,” Thomas said.

On court No. 6, Dillion Segur, who had fallen behind in his first set 6-1, came back in the second set to win the tie breaker 7-5 and captured the last set 6-0.

With the win on the line, Patrick O’Keefe defeated Egon Samaai by clinching a tiebreaker in both sets, 7-6, in the longest match of the day.

As the Flames move toward the conference championship, Johnson said his team is focusing on getting healthy. According to Johnson, Liberty has a lot of guys who are hurting but show great heart executing when they need to.

“We have a lot of talent on this team, so if we can get healthy, we have a shot at anything,” Johnson said.

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