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Wake Forest Wins NCAA Tennis Title

Wake Forest's Ian Dempster returns a shot as teammate Christian Seraphim looks on during doubles play of the NCAA Tennis Championship. PAUL GARBER/WFDD

The Wake Forest men's tennis team won its first national championship Tuesday, the second such major victory for the Demon Deacons this week.

Wake Forest had a lot going for it heading into the NCAA finals against Ohio State, entering the tournament as the number one seed and playing in front of a hometown crowd at the Wake Forest Tennis Center not far from campus.

As it turned out, they needed every advantage they could get.

Wake struck first, winning a point for taking the doubles round. That meant a split of the six singles matches would give the Deacons the title.

Skander Mansouri and Petros Chrysochos both dominated their matches, but Ohio State also won two points.

Wake clung to a tight 3-2 lead, with a tiebreaker being played on one court as Deacon player Bar Botzer was capping off a stunning comeback on another.

When Botzer finally won 7-5, it clinched the Deacon victory. Wake Forest finished the season with a 31-2 record, the most wins in the program's history.

Stunning as it was, it wasn't even the first national championship of the week for the Deacons. Jennifer Kupcho won the individual title for women's golf on Monday in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

The NCAA tennis title represents the school's ninth team championship, joining men's baseball (1955), men's golf (1974, '75, '86), men's soccer (2007) and women's field hockey (2002, '03, '04).

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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