This past Sunday’s league match saw the congregation of 6 Southern California schools: UCSD, UCLA,
UCI, UCSB, SDSU and USC. UCSD was in competition with UCI, UCSB and USC. UCSD fielded a full roster
and won against UCI, UCSB and USC 8-7, 11-4, and 10-5 respectively. Men’s doubles 1 and first year Joey
Zhang won both his games against Marc Rusli of UCSB and Shiv Prathink of USC 11-21, 21-13, 23-21 and
11-21, 21-19 and 21-11 respectively. Joey has been keeping up this incredible performance throughout
the year and a great team member as he is able to hold the men’s singles 1 spot in a commanding
manner. Sophomore Carleen Li came back starting this quarter after taking an extended break and won
against UCI’s Michelle Chen 21-13, 21-11. Unfortunately, she lost to UCSB’s Jessica Wang 13-21, 13-21.
Freshman Mitsuyo Machida put up an impressive performance winning all three of her games against
the three schools that UCSD played. As a single’s specialist, she can concentrate her time to that
discipline and attributes her success to that factor. UCSD Men’s doubles 1 Arnav Taneja and Andrew Li
had a particularly rough showing as they unfortunately lost both their matches to UCSB and USC. This
was probably due to the fact that they are both playing in the single’s discipline as well and were well
exhausted by the time that their doubles matches came around. Andrew Li stated that he was
particularly disappointed in his own performance and bad luck as both him and his partner’s racket
strings broke during their matches. Being as young as they are however, they are already eager to
participate in the next league match on 4/1 along with the rest of the team.