Boise State to Open Season at No. 5 Baylor

The Bronco men's tennis program will begin the spring team dual season on the road, January 18th in Waco, Texas, as they take on No. 5 Baylor before returning home for a four-match homestand.
Boise State is 0-5 all time versus Baylor … the last time they met was Jan. 25, 2014 when the Bears won 4-0.
Baylor has a couple of doubles teams nationally ranked by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) to begin the season. The pair of Sven Lah and Constantin Frantzen are ranked 20th, while the tandem of Ryan Dickerson and Matias Soto come in at No. 25.
Baylor's Lah is also ranked No. 19 nationally in singles.

Boise State sent four members of the team to last weekend's National Collegiate Tennis Classic in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where the Broncos came away with two of the three titles.
The doubles tandem of Blake Bayldon and Simon Arca Costas went 3-0 to win the doubles title defeating teams from San Francisco and UCLA in the quarterfinals and semifinals, before winning the championship in a tiebreaker over San Francisco's duo of Phuc Huynh and Paul Giraud 8-7(5).
In singles, Arca Costas dropped his first match in the round of 32, then rallied to take the consolation singles title.
Kyryll Kryvchun advanced to the main draw singles championship match but came up on the short end of a 6-4, 6-3 score.

Kryvchun went 3-1 last weekend to improve to a team-best 14-4 overall mark on the season.
Wyatt DeMulling enters this weekend with an 8-3 record, followed by Bayldon at 8-5 and Arca Costas at 7-5.

After the number one position that is occupied by the 50th-ranked duo of Bayldon and Arca Costas, the lineup will see some experimenting early on to find the right match-ups and consistency.
Arca Costas and Bayldon enter the week undefeated as a tandem going 6-0 on the year.

There is a potential to see two Broncos for the first time this weekend in Mark Papadopoulos and winter break transfer Michael Bott.
Papadopoulos transferred from East Tennessee State last summer and did not play last fall. He is a native of Sydney, Australia, where he attended Newington College (high school) and was a two-time CIS Champion.
Bott just joined the squad after transferring to Boise State over the winter break. He comes to the program from Irvine Valley College in California where he was an ITA NJCAA California All-American in both singles and doubles as a freshman.

Kristian Widen is in his second year as head coach of his alma mater. The former Bronco tennis player and 1996 Boise State graduate was named head men's tennis coach on May 17, 2018.
He begins his second season with an 11-10 overall record.
He has been a part of seven conference championships at Boise State, three as a player and four as an assistant.
Widen has more than 20 years of coaching experience at various levels, including time previously spent on staff at Boise State with both the men's and women's programs.