Sports

Sonkin stepping into major role in debut season

The University of Wisconsin men’s tennis team has the makings of a very favorable trend in its midst. The trend began last season, when sophomore Lachezar Kasarov made six starts as a freshman for the Badgers and went 3-3.

When Kasarov went down with an injury, freshman Pete Amundson stepped in and won several key matches, including one against Iowa that gave UW its first conference victory of the season. Mark Weinig also saw the first action of his career as a sophomore and earned three Big Ten victories en route to an eight-win season.

The Badgers have seen their young players make significant contributions in the past year and they seem likely to continue the trend this spring, when freshman Jeremy Sonkin makes his regular-season debut for Wisconsin.

Sonkin, a native of Wheaton, Ill., was recruited by the Badgers after an extremely successful high school career in which he accumulated a record of 116-14, setting the Wheaton Warrenville South High School record for career victories. Sonkin was a top-10 finisher in the state of Illinois all four years, finishing second as a senior.

Sonkin has already shown much of the promise he displayed in his prep career, as the freshman turned in a solid fall season. Sonkin opened the fall season with two victories in the Nebraska Invitational, the first tournament of his career. Included in the two victories was a win against an opponent from Big Ten rival Iowa, a team the Badgers will again need to defeat if they are to advance higher up the conference standings this season.

Sonkin continued his strong start by winning two out of three matches at the Michigan Invite, where he had a comeback victory against Cameron Marshall of Michigan State, taking the second set 6-4 and shutting out his opponent 6-0 in the third set after dropping the first set of the match. Sonkin then swept Tommy Dennis of Western Michigan to finish his tournament.

After winning the first match of the ITA Midwest Regional against yet another Big Ten opponent, Avery Ticer of Minnesota, Sonkin entered the Big Ten singles tournament poised to make some noise.

Sonkin won three matches and advanced all the way to the semifinals before finally bowing out, advancing farther than any other Badger. When all was said and done, Sonkin had finished the fall season with a team-high eight victories, five of those coming against conference opponents. Both he and the coaches now feel he is ready to contribute to an even greater extent once the spring season starts after Christmas break.

“I just think that now I’ve got a pretty good preview from what I saw of the fall of what I am going to see in the spring, when I play as No. 2 or even No. 1,” Sonkin said.

Sonkin believes the experience and success he had against conference opponents will help him overall, provided he keeps his trademark intensity up.

“Going into a match when you have played someone already and you’ve lost, you want to come out on fire and take him down,” Sonkin said. “So that is going to make it tough. They say it’s really hard to beat opponents multiple times, but I feel I have an edge over the guys and I come out trying as hard as I can to win. I think that is one of my best traits on the court. My intensity and level of play really help me get through a lot of matches, which is why I think I did so well in my first fall season here.”

The fall season is typically viewed as the developmental part of the year for tennis players, especially freshmen. As much as it was a coming-out party for Sonkin, he too used the time to develop his game as a player.

“You know, coming into college, I would tell you that I was mostly a strip, baseline player, but I’m already learning now to come to the net a lot more, so my game is a little more varied now,” Sonkin said.

That could be bad news for the rest of the conference, who couldn’t handle Sonkin’s game before he started to expand and build upon it. With the fall season over, all the team has left to do is wait for Jan. 21, when the spring season gets back underway.

“I’m playing right now with my teammates, practicing, and we’re all real excited for the spring,” Sonkin said. “I want to get started, see what’s out there and see what I can do. I think I can make a pretty good name for myself as a freshman, so that is my goal.”