EDWARDSVILLE – Tennys Sandgren knew he was going to be facing a tough customer in Marc Polmans Sunday morning.
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Sandgren looked Polmans' recent results prior to their clash in the singles final of the $25,000 USTA Edwardsville Futures tennis tournament presented by the EGHM Foundation at Edwardsville High's tennis center, and saw quite a bit of success.
“He's had some really great success recently,” Sandgren said of Polmans. “I was looking at his record this morning and I saw, 'Futures win', 'Futures win', 'Futures win' and I said, 'OK' “ with a laugh. “But he's obviously playing well.”
Sandgren played well enough himself to defeat Polmans 7-6 (7-3), 1-6, 6-4 to win his second straight Illinois Swing singles title, having won last week's Lewis and Clark Futures Tournament championship to go with his title Sunday morning. Polmans also was in the doubles final, teamed with British player Luke Bambridge against Americans Jackson Withrow and Connor Smith; Withrow/Smith bounced back from early deficits twice in the match and took a 6-3, 6-2 win.
“My opponent played great tennis today,” Sandgren, from Tennessee, said. “I didn't serve as well as I had been; when it's been hot, as it has been in the summertime, and you're able to pop off some first serves and get some free points every game, which I had been, and you take that away, it's a battle at that point.
“I think I lost on serve four or five times today and I think I lost on serve maybe four or five times the last two weeks combined, so today was just a different day for me and it was definitely tougher and more physical.”
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“I had a bit of a slow start today, I thought,” Polmans, who hails from Melbourne, Australia, said, “but he came out of the blocks on fire; I did my best just to hang in there and push it (the first set) to a tiebreaker; it could had gone either way, and unfortunately, it didn't go my way, but I did my best to come back in the second (set) and turn it into a battle from there, so I was happy to push it to three sets.”
Polmans was able to keep Sandgren on his toes thanks to his style of play. “I thought what he did well was his defensive slice (shots),” Sandgren said. “His defensive slice on his backhand side was extremely good; there were a few points where I thought I was in a good place and he would hit one of those knifing cross-court slices and I can't do anything with it – it's back to neutral.”
Polmans had a busy day, playing both in the singles and doubles finals with some rest between matches. “To be honest, I'm pretty exhausted,” Polmans said after the doubles final. “The heat definitely took it out of me today, so I'll be looking forward to having a day off tomorrow, but not too long because the next tournament (in Decatur) starts in two days.”
“I'm definitely happy,” Smith said. “We had tough rounds all the way through; we played some vets in the first round and had two very good doubles players in the last round. We didn't drop a set all week; we played well.”
“We had success with our serve all week,” Withrow said. “I think we only got broken twice the entire week we were here.”
Many of the players in the Edwardsville Futures will move on to this week's Illinois Swing stop in Decatur, the Ursula Beck Pro Tennis Classic, which gets under way with the main draws Tuesday; the finals are set for Aug. 7.
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Dan Brannan also contributed to this story.
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