34 years after last great NCAA run, USC men’s tennis is back on national stage
The last time the South Carolina men’s tennis team was this good, head coach Josh Goffi was a “10-year-old pipsqueak” and his top-ranked doubles team of Connor Thomson and Toby Samuel hadn’t been born.
Now all three of them are stationed in Florida with a massive opportunity ahead of them and championship aspirations on their mind.
South Carolina, the No. 9 overall seed in the 2023 NCAA Tournament, has won three matches this month to advance its first national quarterfinal since 1989. The Gamecocks will play No. 1 Texas on Thursday in Orlando for a spot in Friday’s national semifinals.
It’s the continuation of a major breakthrough for Goffi’s program, which finished the 2021 and 2022 seasons ranked No. 13 and No. 10 nationally, respectively, before advancing past the NCAA round of 16 for the first time in his 13-year tenure last Saturday.
“We’re going to play to win at all costs,” Goffi said Wednesday. “We’re not (just) happy to be here. Anything short of a title isn’t what we want.”
Here’s everything you need to know about the Gamecocks heading into their Thursday quarterfinal match against Texas at the USTA National Campus.
How South Carolina got here
South Carolina went 19-6 in the regular season and 8-4 in the SEC, good for fourth in a conference that sent 10 teams to NCAAs and has five remaining in the quarterfinals.
USC’s regular-season résumé included eight wins over Top 25 opponents and four wins over Top 10 opponents, including a home win against Ohio State in March that earned the Gamecocks their highest team ranking (No. 2) in program history. The previous high was No. 5.
After a quick and disappointing exit from the SEC Tournament — USC lost to Texas A&M in the quarterfinals — the team scored its best-ever tournament seed and the right to host first- and second-round matches at the Carolina Tennis Center, its home venue in Columbia.
Amid that early conference tournament loss, as well as some injuries and missed opportunities late in the regular season, “a little bit of doubt crept in” among the Gamecocks, Thomson said.
Were they truly elite?
“We as a group just decided enough’s enough,” Thomson said. “Let’s put our foot down. Let’s go out there and achieve what we can, because why not? Like, why should we not win the national championship?”
Razor-focused and playing freely, South Carolina breezed past S.C. State in the first round, 4-0, and Florida State in the second round, 4-1, before beating No. 8 seed Tennessee, 4-2, on the road last Saturday.
NCAA men’s tennis matches follow a best-of-seven scoring format. Teams start by playing three doubles matches simultaneously, with the winner of that best of three competition taking the “doubles point,” and then move on to playing six singles matches simultaneously.
From there, they’ll play singles until one team has won four total matches (winning the doubles point puts you up 1-0 entering singles and makes that far easier, as you only need to go .500 among six matches to win). Once a team hits four, all other ongoing matches are over.
South Carolina’s top tennis players
Any conversation here starts and ends with Thomson and Samuel, the USC juniors who’ve combined to form the nation’s top-ranked doubles pairing.
Thomson, of Scotland, and Samuel, of England, went 22-4 in doubles this season and ranked No. 1 among 90 pairings in the ITA’s latest rankings for Division I men.
They’ve held that ranking for 10 straight weeks and were 11-3 against ranked doubles pairings this year, with six top 25 wins and three top 10 wins.
Not bad for a pair who, according to Samuel, “had never really played with each other” until last fall.
“Then we played a match and won pretty easily and I was like, ‘Oh, this could be like something special here,’” Samuel said. “We sort of just built off that. And we kept winning. I think we haven’t really slowed down since. It’s been a pretty like cool experience to share with him.”
Thomson and Samuel earned the top seed in the NCAA Doubles Tournament, an individual event that takes place after the completion of the current team championship USC is currently gunning for.
Unsurprisingly, first-team All SEC selections Samuel and Thomson are also South Carolina’s top two singles players, ranked No. 10 and No. 16 by the ITA.
Second-team All SEC pick James Story ranks No. 116 among singles players and combines with partner Jake Beasley to form the Gamecocks’ second-best doubles pairing (No. 48).
Meet the head coach
Goffi, in his 13th season with South Carolina men’s tennis, has taken the program back to the national stage since being hired in July 2010 for his first career college head coaching job.
Goffi had a tall task in replacing Kent DeMars, who coached USC for 26 seasons, won a record 390 games and was named Division I coach of the year in 1989, when the Gamecocks had their best season ever and reached the national semifinal round before losing to Stanford.
Heading into 2023, the Gamecocks had qualified for eight NCAA Tournaments in 12 seasons, finished among the ITA Top 25 seven times and averaged 19.6 wins over the past five seasons under Goffi. Their 2023 season will, obviously, bolster all three of those totals.
Goffi, a native of Brazil, was an assistant coach at Duke and Arizona State before getting hired at South Carolina. He also spent five years on the ATP Tour as a professional tennis player from 2001-05 and was a three-time all-conference college player at Clemson from 1999-2001.
South Carolina’s coach credited his earliest teams for helping lay the foundation for the program’s 2023 success. USC has an active alumni base and very active alumni group chat at the moment, with former lettermen “constantly pumping up our guys,” Goffi said.
“Every win that we get is a win for those guys,” Goffi said. “It absolutely is. It sounds really cliché, but those guys, they went through a lot and they suffered a lot and they had a lot of tough seasons early on.”
“But they knew that it wasn’t for them necessarily during those years. It was for the build of the program. ... Now they’re seeing the results come to fruition. It’s pretty cool.”
How to watch USC men’s tennis
- Who: No. 1 Texas vs. No. 9 South Carolina
- What: NCAA men’s tennis tournament quarterfinals
- When: 5 p.m. Thursday
- Where: USTA National Campus, Orlando, Fla.
- Stream: Cracked Racquets YouTube Channel (free)
- Next up: The winner of Texas-South Carolina will play either No. 4 Kentucky or No. 5 Virginia in the national semifinals Saturday. That match will be broadcast on The Tennis Channel, though the time is TBD. Virginia beat Kentucky in last year’s national championship match.
This story was originally published May 17, 2023 at 11:12 AM.
