One of the defining qualities of a great sports team is the ability to make the best of a bad situation. In May, the Columbia men’s tennis team went on the road to play No. 22 Wake Forest in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. On paper, Columbia had a shot to score its first NCAA win in recent history, but injuries to the No. 2 and 3 singles players, coupled with the fact that they hadn’t played a match in nearly a month, made the road much, much tougher. Injuries forced the squad to reshuffle its doubles lineup for the first time all season. Head coach Bid Goswami paired Kevin Kung and Nate Gery and put them at No. 2 doubles. From there, a winning combination was formed.

“It was making sense to me last year,” Goswami said. “I felt it was by accident that it happened because Mihai [Nichifor] got hurt, he couldn’t play doubles.”

“Kevin was active at the net,” the coach continued. “I thought if I gave him Nate with his big serve, Kevin would take advantage of that. I kept that in the back of my mind and thought, let’s start off with them.”

Kung, a senior from Hong Kong, and Gery, a sophomore from Ontario, Canada, form quite a doubles team on the tennis court. Gery, a big-serving righty, is complemented by the left-handed Kung, whose quick hands enable him to end points quickly and effectively up at net.

Kung and Gery played an impressive match against Wake Forest, leading 6-4 when it was halted because the doubles point had been decided.
“That was the first time we played together,” Kung said, “and it worked out pretty well.”

“We didn’t lose any points because of miscommunication,” Gery added. “And for a new team, it’s important to understand and have a familiarity with your partner. We played the important points well.”

Aside from their incredible talent (both were ranked in the top 275 in the world as juniors), there are several factors on the court that make the duo effective.
“Nate’s serve and my poaching is one thing,” Kung said.

“We take care of our service games pretty well,” Gery said. “That allows us to really play our return games aggressively, because we have confidence that we are going to hold.”
The duo was once again paired up in the fall as Goswami tried to recapture the success that the pair had against Wake Forest.

The results were great at first. They advanced to the semifinals of the Princeton Invitational “A” draw and lost to the top seed and eventual champion from Penn State, 8-5, although Columbia had numerous break chances early in the match to get ahead.

“They played a really good tournament the first tournament,” Goswami said. “I thought, wow, that was good!”

“We came into Princeton having confidence from playing well at Wake Forest,” Gery said. “Our second match was good, we beat a good team. We put some pressure on ourselves that we had won matches, and now it was time to beat a top team, but there were still positives to take away from that match.”

What followed, however, was a slump that lasted until this weekend’s National Intercollegiate Indoor Championships. The duo struggled to win from mid-September until November, losing close matches almost every time.

“They were just not playing well,” Goswami said. “They played regionals as badly as you can play, it’s not a bad team [Sacred Heart], but they lost 8-3 and it was not even close, so I thought we needed a change.”

“We were up 7-4 against Penn’s No. 1 team at the National Tennis Center Invitational, and we lost a bad match,” Gery said. “Then against Dartmouth we were up a break, and we just didn’t close and finish. We were ahead and fell apart. We just weren’t taking care of our jobs at the end of matches, and then it became a slump, and then we didn’t play well.”

Kung points to a practice match of an example of how bad it got.

“In practice, we played Cyril and Tizian [Bucher], and their returns are just incredible. We lost at love every service game—we didn’t win a point when we served. We lost 6-0. It just started to break down our confidence.”

“Tennis is a mental sport,” he went on. “At first we played with nothing to lose and we started off well, but then we started to realize, ‘We’re good,’ and we started to put pressure to uphold our ranking or seeding in tournaments and it just spiraled.”

The duo had one last chance to get back on track in the fall, however, as Columbia was given a wildcard into the singles and doubles draw at the National Intercollegiate Indoor Championships as the host school. Kung and Gery were dealt the wildcard for doubles.

“I think it’s important that we were invited into the tournament,” Gery said. “It’s important not to try to just hang in there with these guys. We actually wanted to compete. Bid wanted to make sure that that would happen.”

“It was a clean slate for us,” he continued. “We put in the work a week before, and we were playing to beat these guys, we were playing to win and to prove to ourselves that we can do it.”

The tournament didn’t get off to a great start for Gery and Kung, however, as they lost in the first round of the main draw to a big-serving team from Ohio State. The duo was entered in the back draw, and it was there that they recaptured their magic.

In the quarterfinals of the back draw, they played a team from BYU, which won the Mountain Region doubles title.

“I thought that this might be the last tournament that I played in college tennis,” said Kung, a senior. “I got tight at a crucial point against Ohio State. I just thought, I’m going to go out and play the points. If we lose, it’s going to be because they played better.”

Columbia stayed on serve until 7-8, where BYU had two match points with Kung serving. But then two solid serves and good volleys by Gery staved off the match points, and the duo roared back to win the match in the tiebreak.

Up next in the semifinals was the No. 2 team in the nation from Stanford of Bradley Klahn and Ryan Thacher. The team had won the ITA National Indoor Championships in 2009, and Klahn was the NCAA singles champion in May and played in the U.S. Open.

“We knew they were a good team—better and more experienced than we were,” Gery said. “But that’s the thing about indoor doubles. With a good serve, anyone can beat anyone. It’s enough to be in good position and in a pro-set [eight-game set], it’s not like three out of five sets where the better players have more time to play better. We didn’t really know what to expect.”

Gery had actually played Klahn, a junior, a few times in juniors in both singles and doubles.

Kung conceded that the level of tennis from the Stanford pair was impressive at the start of the match.

“I was a bit afraid when I saw them warming up,” he said. “They didn’t miss a ball. But then Nate held easily, and then I held easily, and then I started to think that these guys aren’t that good. There’s nothing different that they do in doubles that we can’t. But I was surprised that we were competing at the same level as them consistently.”

The match played out similar to the BYU match in the fact that it remained on serve throughout. Columbia fought its way into a tiebreak, where Kung and Gery fell behind 5-1. But as they had all weekend, they fought their way back to tie it at five. Then Gery stepped up to serve.

“I was serving so well,” he said. “I was going to go for a big first serve, or a big second serve and come in. I had nothing to lose. I felt like it would be stupid to play safe and lose at that point.”

Gery bombed a serve out wide that Thacher mishit. The backhand stayed low, however, and Gery missed the volley. Stanford served it out on its first and only match point.

“It all balances out,” Kung said. “If I look at just those two points, yeah, I feel like we were pretty unlucky. But we were lucky to come back from 1-5 down. We were also down 0-40 on serve, and won five straight points at one point.”

The future is bright for Kung and Gery when it comes to the spring and team dual matches. The win over BYU may give the team a national ranking when the new rankings are released in January, and it’s sure to instill confidence in the pair.

“I think the way they played, they played really well,” Goswami said. “Sometimes you just click. Nate has a big serve and Kevin is active at the net, and Kevin has served much better in the last year or so and that’s made a difference.”

“It shows us that we play at this high level,” Gery said. “We’re not going to see this high caliber all season. We want to improve our return games and win matches that we should win. It’s all about finding consistency, but we know we have played at that level before and it doesn’t get better than that competition.”

In fact, the duo was broken only once in three matches at National Indoors, but failed to break serve in any of those matches.

“We want to beat everyone that we’re supposed to beat,” Kung said. “I’d like for us to make spring nationals [NCAA Tournament] and compete against players of this caliber again.”

One of the factors behind their goals and expectations for the spring is their continued improvement since coming to Columbia.

“My doubles has improved a lot,” Kung said. “Bid is one of the best doubles coaches in the entire country, and it’s the same with Howie [associate head coach Howard Endelman]. Howie was a great doubles player as well.”

Although the team recently lost its top two players to graduation, Gery and Kung should help keep the Lions competitive in the Ivy League while they continue to make their presence felt on the national stage.