UCLA’s Jason Netter: His Play Varies From Good, to Bad, to Ugly : Tennis: Top singles player is at his best in tournaments, but his performance slumps in dual meets.

Jason Netter, top singles player for the UCLA men’s tennis team, can be either very good or very bad, but he was at his best at the biggest event of the season so far--the Pacific 10 Conference tournament.

Two weeks ago, Netter won the Pac-10 singles championship, upsetting Jared Palmer of two-time defending NCAA champion Stanford in the semifinals and another Stanford standout, Alex O’Brien, in the final.

Netter also won the Rolex regional tournament singles title in November, defeating Arizona’s Scott Sigerseth in straight sets in the final. In March, he defeated Donny Isaak of USC to capture the championship of the Southern California Intercollegiate tournament. Netter’s record in tournaments is 18-2.

But in dual meets, he is only 8-14. Before capturing the Pac-10 title, he had lost six of eight dual matches and had dropped to No. 50 in the rankings.

In his past two outings, he lost both his singles matches as the Bruins won at home against Pepperdine, 5-3, and defeated UC Irvine, 6-3, on the road. He was defeated by Pepperdine’s ninth-ranked David Wells-Roth, 2-6, 6-0, 6-4, and lost to Irvine’s 20th-ranked Trevor Kronemann, 6-4, 6-1.

UCLA Coach Glenn Bassett, whose Bruins have won seven NCAA championships and 12 conference crowns in 24 years, isn’t sure how to explain the dichotomy between Netter’s play in tournaments and in dual meets.

Bassett said that in tournaments, “maybe (Netter) gets into the swing of things. In dual matches you play (only) every three or four days. It may be a matter of getting into rhythm.”

Netter struggled in his first match in the Pac-10 tournament against California’s Matt Stroyman before winning, 6-1, 2-6, 7-6.

Netter’s match against Pepperdine’s Wells-Roth on Friday was in some ways a capsule of his season. He was hot in the first set, cold in the second set and competitive in the third set before losing.

When Pepperdine defeated the Bruins, 5-4, in Malibu in February, Wells-Roth won in straight sets. Last week Wells-Roth seemed to be trying to overpower Netter in the opening set, attempting to hit winners with every stroke. But he made a lot of unforced errors, and Netter picked him apart with his accurate base-line strokes.

In the second set, it was Netter’s turn to make mistakes, and Wells-Roth won six consecutive games. Netter battled back in the third set before losing, 6-4.

Richard Gallien, Pepperdine co-coach, said that Netter “did not play well at all” in the second set and that his “concentration sort of wandered” in the third set.

“If David had continued to play poorly, it probably would have gone Jason’s way,” Gallien said.

Netter thinks he hasn’t played better in dual matches because he has been bothered for about two years by tendinitis in his right shoulder. But he said that the only thing affected by the tendinitis was his serve and that he hasn’t felt pain in the shoulder for about six weeks.

He said that he thinks the tendinitis has been cured by treatment and exercise and that the shoulder has given him “no worries at all. I can go out and serve as hard as I want, and I’ve had no problems so far.”

Netter said he thinks other reasons for his up-and-down year might have been that he didn’t play with much confidence and was not in the best physical shape at the start of the season.

Gallien said that Netter’s game demands that he be in top physical condition.

“He doesn’t win a lot of points with overheads and volleys,” Gallien said. “He’s not an attacker, which means that he’s been playing a lot of long points. Over the course of the season that’s quite a physical grind.”

Netter said the losses in dual matches have served a useful purpose. “Losing got me into better shape and got me to focus on tennis,” he said.

Netter will focus on the NCAA team and individual championships, which begin May 18 at Indian Wells. He is a long shot to win a national singles title. The tournament favorites will be Todd Martin of Northwestern, Jose-Luis Noriega of the University of San Diego and Jonathan Stark of Stanford.

Stark, the nation’s top-ranked freshman, did not play in the Pac-10 tournament because of an injury.

Gallien thinks that Wells-Roth and Alejo Mancisidor, a Pepperdine freshman from Spain who is ranked 21st, should also be in the running for the NCAA singles championship.

“Whoever wins the (NCAA) individual title will be someone who is in great shape, I’ll tell you that,” Gallien said, alluding to the desert heat.

“Anything can happen,” Bassett said. “A million people have a shot (at the title). It will be interesting to see how people can handle the heat--and it will be hot.”

Gallien believes that Netter is a threat to win the NCAA title because he won the Pac-10 championship.

“You will have to be on your game for four straight days in oppressive heat,” Gallien said, adding that a player in the individual portion of the tournament could also be physically drained if his school does well in team competition.

But don’t count out Netter. After all the national competition is a tournament, and tournaments seem to be his forte.