Segouin is the real thing. He’s Canadian so not as much US exposure but he and Oliver Crawford were consistently 1 and 2 in class. Segouin has played the French Open junior and reached Eddie Herr final.
What’s scary is as good as Illini are this year, Ohio State has John McNally at #3 right now. McNally is a top 5 guy in 2017 class right behind Segouin. McNally at 3 is a lot like us having Vukic at 5 as a freshman. He’s going to win a lot of matches easily.
If we can keep doubles rolling, this is going to be an exciting year.
I agree that Sigouin is excellent, but Hiltzik really should have put up a better fight. No ad scoring can sometimes make the final score of a match look more lopsided than it really was, but Sigouin really dominated this match in all aspects.
With that being said, I was still impressed with the team's overall performance this weekend and the tenacity to fight back after going down 3-1 vs NC. It's not easy to beat Duke and NC back to back, but our guys were within a few games of doing just that. Maybe the score would have been flip-flopped if this match up was in Champaign.
It was great to see Vukic and Hiltzik take down a very good doubles team and the freshmen continue to play excellent doubles in big situations (even if they struggled in singles vs NC).
It doesn't get any easier with Cal and Stanford coming to town this weekend. This is already turning out to be a very exciting season!