As Rhiann Newborn and Breanna Bachini grinded out an exhausting, momentum-shifting, doubles point-determining win last weekend against Pittsburgh — a hapless team just a year ago — it symbolized the shift Syracuse tennis has seen over the past two years.

Since Syracuse moved from the Big East to the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2013, SU tennis has seen a huge shift in its matches throughout the season.

“There are no easy matches in the ACC,” said senior Amanda Rodgers, a contributing writer for The Daily Orange. “The ACC is one of the strongest conferences in tennis. It was a big step up from the Big East.”

For Pitt to play Syracuse so closely is representative of the conference’s toughness. The Panthers may have finished 0-14 in conference play just one season ago, but Pitt is still a team that is difficult to put away.

No. 67 Syracuse (6-4, 1-3 ACC) continues its gauntlet conference schedule by taking on two top conference opponents this weekend. No. 14 Miami (6-2, 2-0) visits Drumlins Tennis Center on Friday while No. 21 Duke (6-5, 2-0) comes to town for a Sunday matchup. Syracuse will look to respond from its precipitous fall from program-record 34th to 67th in this week’s Intercollegiate Tennis Association poll, which was preceded by a loss to then-No. 26 Notre Dame.

“There is a lot of depth in the ACC,” SU head coach Younes Limam said. “Every team can compete at a high level. It doesn’t matter which school we’re playing or what ranking we’re playing because they have so much depth.”

The Orange needs to grit out tough victories in order to win this weekend, Limam said, and garner its first defining conference win since it joined the ACC. The conference boasts four teams in the nation’s top 15, including the nation’s No. 1 in North Carolina.

This weekend, Bachini will prepare for the matches as she normally does, without minding the numbers that precede the team’s names on game day handouts.

Bachini doesn’t focus on rankings because Syracuse, by the numbers, wasn’t supposed to have won many of the matches it has this season. Syracuse wasn’t ranked inside the country’s top 75 when it beat then-No. 39 University of South Florida, and it ranked 57th when it defeated No. 35 Princeton in late January.

“Being a competitor, you want to play the best people,” Rodgers said. “Playing in the Big East, even though there were good players in the Big East, it was not as fun. We all have to up our games a little bit.”

She’ll get that from Duke, which has three top 100 singles players, and Miami, who boasts the reigning ACC Player of the Week, Clementina Riobueno, who is the 62nd-ranked singles player in the nation and comprises the 17th-ranked doubles tandem with her teammate Monique Albuquerque.

While Syracuse isn’t impressed by rankings, the team still aspires to be one of the one of the conference’s best squads.

“(To be a top-ranked ACC team) is one of our goals,” Limam said. “But we’re in the process. We definitely are not happy just competing in the ACC — we want to be the best team in the ACC.”

Published on March 5, 2015 at 12:12 am

Contact Sam: sjfortie@syr.edu | @Sam4TR