10 - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, March 31, 1999 'M' tennis inspired by Eisner's last season e By Raphael Gooddtein Daily Sports Writer No matter what the sport or who is playing, Michigan expects to succeed. Fans don't care if a crucial senior class has gradu- ated. Or if there are other extenu- ating circumstances that would cause the team to fail. TENNIS At Michigan you win, and this Commentary puts a lot pressure on the players-_________ and coaching staff. This year the Michigan tennis team came into the season having lost some important seniors. The team needed its freshmen to step up and play well to have any chance at winning coach Brian Eisner's 20th Big Ten title. And this year, the Wolverines have gone far and beyond what people expected of them. In fact, the freshmen have played so well that the team has ele- vated its already lofty preseason goals. The team is 2-0 in the Big Ten and 9-1 overall. More importantly, they seem able to challenge Illinois, one of the top five teams in the country, for a Big Ten title. The freshmen - Henry Beam, Ben Cox and Danny McCain - lost just two dual matches between the three of them before the Big Ten season started. The team was excelling, but had yet to face adver- sity. That all changed on March 1. Shortly after beating San Diego State, Eisner announced that he would retire after his 31st year at Michigan. The season would now be remembered no matter what happened during the rest of the matches. Would the added pressure of the retiring legend cause the young Wolverines to fail? The upperclassmen would not allow it to happen. Co-captains senior Will Farah and junior Matt Wright have stepped up their roles both on and off the court. And the rest of the team followed their lead. In fact, the team has rallied around Eisner and become much closer in the face of his retirement. The Wolverines are not worrying about who their next coach will be, or the added pressure of playing in Eisner's last few meets. Instead, they focused sole- ly on the meet. The Wolverines, considered a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten team a month ago, are now looking like a team that may contend for Eisner's final Big Ten title. Having already dealt with its coach retiring, this weekend the team once again stared adversity in the face and came away stronger. This weekend the team opened the Big Ten season with back-to-back road meets at Iowa and Wisconsin. The team had the previous week off and had to stay sharp to get two wins it desperately need- ed. Michligan arrived for its outdoor match with Iow1 and was met with 23-mile per hour gusts. The team had yet to practice outdoors and only once before had they actually played outdoors. The Wolverines battled and found a way to score a hard-fought 5-2 victory over the Hawkeyes. But there was no time to celebrate their first Big Ten win of the season. The team had a flight to catch. Michigan was supposed to fly into Madison to play against Wisconsin the next day at 11 a.m. But the flight was delayed and the team did not land in Wisconsin until after midnight. 9 The team spent the whole time together. And, after all they had been through, there was no chance that Northwest Airlines was going to tear this team apart. Like many other times this year, Michigan reversed a tough set of circumstances and came away 4-3 victors. DHANI JONES/Daily Co-captain Matt Wright has been a leader for the Michigan men's tennis team this year, but a promising crop of freshmen have also emerged to boost the Wolverines in Brian Eisner's final season as coach. Thrilling final attracts record-low audience UConn's stunning win NEW YORK - Even a thrilling national championship game could not prevent TV ratings from falling to an all-time low for CBS. Connecticut's upset of Duke on Monday night posted a 17.2 national rating and a 27 share, the lowest since CBS began televising the event in 1982. The 1999 tournament as a whole had a 6.8/15 share, down 7 percent from last year's 7.3/17. The previous mark of futility was a 7.2 in 1997, the year Arizona defeated Kentucky in the title game. This year's championship game was down 3 percent from last season's Kentucky-Utah final,which had a 17.8 watched by fewest people since 1972; women' rating and 28 share. It was the lowest- rated NCAA championship game since the 1972 UCLA-Florida State final, which was played in the afternoon. "The games weren't as close as they had been last year" said CBS spokes- woma Leslie Ann Wade. "You're always a little disappointed even when 'it's a high number because you'd like to see it higher. This is one of our favorite events and this doesn't do anything to alter our affection for it." Only 14 of the 63 games were decid- ed by five points or fewer, just one went into overtime and 17 were blowouts of 20 points or more. Last year's tournament had 20 games within five points, five in overtime and 11 determined by 20 points or more. "When you have close games through the whole tournament, people start to catch on, make an investment and end up with us on Monday night," added Wade. "I think that hurt us a lit- tle bit." Ratings for most of the West Coast cities fell because there were no repre- sentatives from the region, unlike last year when both Stanford and Utah made the Final Four. The championship game dropped 28 percent in Los Angeles and 13 percent in San Francisco. For the women's championship game between Purdue and Duke, ESPN set a record with the biggest rating in the network's four-year history of broad- casting the event. It broke the 4.0 mark set in 1997 between Tennessee and Old Dominion. The game posted a 4.3 cable rating in ESPN's universe of 75.8 million homes, an increase of 16 percent from s viewers still climb last year's Tennessee-Louisiana Tech title game that had a 3.7. Overall tournament ratings were also up this year for the women. Games on ESPN rose 24 percent and ESPN2 had a 8 percent increase, compared with last season. "Women's basketball is expanding in depth and gaining viewers on a sea- sonal basis,' said Len DeLuca, ESPN vice president of programming devel- opment. "Are we surprised even without Tennessee and UConn that we continue to grow? No, because we are college basketball's best platform for promo- tion and growth, whether it be women's or men's.' The rating is the percentage of TV households in the nation tuned to a pro- gram, and each network point repre- sents 994,000 homes. The share is the percentage tuned to a program among those televisions on at the time. Do you have a BACHELOR'S DEGREE? 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S-Caesar Stop by or call 764-055 to have your SENIOR WISH published April 15th deadline March 31 AP PHOTO Richard Hamilton and the Connecticut Huskies were on top of their game in Monday's victory over Duke, but few members of CBS's national audience tuned in to see UConn's performance. Before. After. I A1. ....!.- _ . _ -UO± I I-