After rattling off eight consecutive wins to pull to .500 on the season, the Georgetown men’s tennis team will head into the Big East tournament below .500 and with a pair of losses.

After steamrolling opponent after opponent for the last month, Georgetown’s men’s tennis team hit its first roadblock.

The Hoyas were at James Madison University for the first leg of a tough road trip to close out the regular season, and they fell 4-3 to the Dukes yesterday. The loss snapped an eight- match winning streak and dropped the men to 10-11 on the season.

One month ago, the men’s tennis team came home from a dismal trip to Florida with its future looking bleak. The Hoyas were staring down a 2-10 record, the heart of their schedule and several teams with nationally ranked players.

In almost any college sport, championships are won by either being consistently better than your opponents or peaking at the right time. With the Big East tournament just around the corner, the Georgetown men’s tennis team is trying to follow the latter of the two paths.

Things looked very bleak for the Georgetown men’s tennis team. They had just come back after a trip down to Florida where they had lost to Lynn University and Barry, two of the best Division II schools in the country. Yet, Head Coach Gordie Ernst stayed optimistic. He would constantly remark that the men “are overdue for a win.”

With the Hoya women able to earn a non-conference win over the weekend, Big East competition still proved difficult for Georgetown as the men and women lost three matches by a combined score of 18-3 against conference foes.

Tennis Head Coach Gordie Ernst has long been a believer of playing tough non-conference competition to prepare his teams for the rigors of the Big East. The opponents his men’s and women’s teams faced this weekend certainly fell into this category, as the Hoyas were handed a total of four losses.

Just after highly ranked Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer were upset in the Australian Open, the Hoyas looked for upsets of their own.

Facing tough competition on the road this weekend, the Hoya men came up empty to even out their record, while the women took one of three matches to open their spring campaign.