Nicholls men’s and women’s tennis teams face busy slate of matches to close regular season

Although the Nicholls tennis teams are done with their Southland regular-season schedules, the Colonels will be busy in the week leading up the conference tournament scheduled for April 18-24 in San Antonio.

The Nicholls women will play at Tulane on Wednesday, while the men are at Southern University on Thursday. The men are slated to host Prairie View on Friday at 2 p.m. Saturday, both the men and women conclude the regular season by hosting Loyola in a match scheduled for 2 p.m. at the Thibodaux Regional Sports Complex.

“It’s funny. It’s almost the tale of two cities,” said Nicholls coach Greg Harkins with a reference to the Charles Dickens classic. “The men are on a roll. They’ll probably run the table for the last few matches, where the girls are kind of stuck in neutral.

“But those matches give us experience. They should toughen us up, get us stronger. We’re heading in the stretch here this weekend. We have a senior day on Saturday, which would be a nice day to honor all the seniors that we have and the fifth-year students. All these matches, you have to play, recover, and get back out and play again.”

With so many matches in so few days, there is little time to recover physically and mentally, according to Harkins.

“You gotta bounce back,” the Nicholls coach said. “You don’t have a lot of time to mull over it. You just have to absorb it and learn from it and get back out and play again. It toughens you up. Division I is the toughest tennis out there today. There’s nothing tougher.”

The Nicholls men are 1-3 in the Southland and 9-6 overall, and on a three-game winning streak that started with the conference win over Lamar. The Nicholls women are 0-7 in the SLC and 6-12 overall.

“They’re feeling good,” Harkins said of the men’s team. “I don’t think there’s a lot of difference in the levels. Honestly, even on the girls side too, there’s not a whole lot, but it’s just that difference in confidence. They keep chipping away, keep getting wins. If it really doesn’t matter to them whether they’re away, home, driving long hours, they’re just hungry for more. They’ve got that appetite.

“Hopefully, some of that can feed into the ladies, giving them a little bit of relief, too. They deserve to win, but you’ve got to take it. No one is going to give it to you.”