NCAA Tennis Championships : USC’s Amend-Black Takes Doubles Title

Byron Black, who was near flawless, combined with Eric Amend Sunday to give USC its 20th individual title in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. men’s tennis championships.

The unseeded Trojan team outlasted UC Irvine’s Mike Briggs and Trevor Kronemann, 7-5, 6-7 (5-7), 7-5, at the University of Georgia’s Henry Feild Stadium.

USC has won three of the last four doubles titles, including 1987 when Rick Leach and Scott Melville defeated UC Irvine’s Julian Barham and Darren Yates.

“When you come to USC you become a good doubles player because our coaches are so good,” said Amend, a fifth-year senior. “But the thing that I’m most disappointed in is we never won a team championship for our coach (Dick Leach). He deserves it.”

In Sunday’s singles final, Louisiana State’s Donni Leaycraft overcame a shaky second set to defeat Nebraska’s Steven Jung, 6-1, 4-6, 6-3. The unseeded Jung, who lives in Hacienda Heights, missed his chance to become the first player from a school that did not make the team field to win the title. He is the first Big Eight player to reach the NCAA championship match.

“I played a smart game,” said Jung, who graduated two weeks ago with a degree in finance. “I thought I played a winning game. I just came up short.”

Leaycraft, among those seeded nine through 16, became LSU’s first NCAA tennis champion. A junior, he’s also the first non-senior to take the NCAA title since Georgia’s Mikael Pernfors won in 1984.

Leaycraft’s strategy of sitting on the baseline and waiting for Jung to make mistakes worked in the first set when Jung admittedly forced the action.

In the second set, Jung relaxed and lured Leaycraft into errors. He also won four sudden-death points. But with a 3-2 lead in the third set, Jung lost his patience. He hit a forehand wide on a sudden-death point that allowed Leaycraft to tie the set. Leaycraft won three more games to take the title.

In doubles, both Irvine players and Amend gave most of the credit to Black, a sophomore from Zimbabwe. He served consistently and returned nearly everything the Anteaters hit. He was a major reason USC broke Irvine’s serve five times. Black held his serve each time.

“He kept us in the match,” Amend said. “If it weren’t for him, we would have lost.”