Felton and MacMaster Come Up Short in the ITA Northeast Regional Championship

MacMaster teamed with Alistair Felton at the ITA Northeast Regionals, held at Cornell, and advanced to the championship round beating four teams in the process. (Photo courtesy of Gil Talbot) 

CAMBRDIGE, Mass. – The Harvard men’s tennis doubles team of Alistair Felton and Casey MacMaster advanced to the final round of the ITA Northeast Regional Championship on Tuesday, held in Ithaca, N.Y., but fell to a Princeton team of Matt Siow and Matt Spindler 8-5. The duo defeated four teams during the five day tournament including teams from rival Dartmouth and Cornell.

Felton entered the tournament as one half of the defending regional champion after he and Andy Nguyen took the crown last year, earning a berth into the ITA National Championships. Felton and MacMaster got off to a commanding start to the weekend, as they defeated Dartmouth’s Alex De Chantellus and Chris Kipouras, and Cornell’s Venkat Iyer and Alex Sidney by a decisive 8-4 margin in both matches.  The tandem would face St. Johns’ Milo Hauk and Gustav Kallen in the quarterfinals and edged the Red Storm pair 9-8 (3), before defeating Bastian Bornkessel and Ruben Devos from Binghamton 8-3 in the semifinals.

The tournament could have seen an all-Harvard championship as Denis Nguyen and Andy Nguyen made a run through their bracket defeating teams from Marist and Dartmouth before falling to Daniel Hoffman and Mark Powers from Yale, 9-7 in the quarterfinal round. 

In the singles draw Jonathan Pearlman played as the number one seed and recorded two victories over St. Bonaventure’s Elliot Fanshel and Dartmouth’s Brandon Debot. The senior then faced Ivan Turudic from Penn and forced a third set but came up short losing 6-3, 3-6, 6-3. Denis Nguyen made it the second farthest for Harvard in the singles bracket, defeating Jonis Van Eck from Marist and Danny Riggs from Cornell in the rounds of 64 and 32 respectively. Nguyen would meet Hauk  in the round of 16 and lose in two sets 6-3, 6-4.
 
Harvard will prepare for its final home contest of the fall season, slated for Oct. 28-30, competing in the Harvard Halloween Invitational at the Beren Tennis Center.