Nicolas Baena and Botond Nagy began their college doubles record with three matches and three wins. The USD freshmen beat pairings from Grand Canyon, California and Santa Clara across the San Diego Veterans Tennis Classic, closing the weekend Sunday without dropping a doubles match on their home courts.
The scores tightened and then opened. Baena and Nagy defeated Grand Canyon's Andreas Loizas and Victor Lima 7-5 on Friday. They repeated that score Saturday against California's Benjamin Berger and Melchior Delloeye. On Sunday, they beat Santa Clara's Luca Lemaitre Vilchis and Tiago Boschmans 6-4. Each set required one late service break or the protection of an equivalent margin.
The sweep matters because doubles compresses decision-making. A single set leaves little room to recover from a slow start, and new teams must establish return positions, poaching patterns and serve order while the result is already moving. USD's release did not provide point-by-point sequences, so the scores document close finishes without identifying which player delivered each break or hold.
Baena also earned a singles win Friday, beating Loizas 6-4, 7-5 after facing him in doubles. California's Leonardo Cattaneo stopped him 6-3, 6-3 on Saturday. Lemaitre Vilchis then won Sunday's match 7-5, 7-5. The three results gave Baena six competitive sets against three programs and one straight-set victory in his first fall appearance.
Nagy pushed Grand Canyon's Nikos Lehmann through three sets Friday. He lost the opener 6-4, answered 6-4 in the second and fell 7-5 in the deciding set. His singles weekend ended there in the published results, making the undefeated doubles run the clearer measure of his first USD competition.
The pairing won 20 games and allowed 14 across its three doubles sets. That aggregate cannot show how the points were played, but it does show consistent separation: two wins by two games and one by the same two-game minimum needed to close a standard set without a tiebreak. No opponent pushed the freshmen into an additional breaker.
The opponents also changed each day. Grand Canyon supplied the first test, California the second and Santa Clara the last. The freshmen therefore had to reset their return plan and net responsibilities rather than solve the same pairing repeatedly. USD's recap does not publish serve order or break points, so the clearest durable fact is the result across three different combinations.
Fall tennis separates individual development from the dual-match standings that arrive later in the academic year. These wins do not count as a team victory over Grand Canyon, California or Santa Clara. They do give USD a tested freshman combination after one weekend, plus a list of singles situations for each player to review before the next bracket.
Baena's singles score line adds another useful contrast. His one victory and two losses were all completed in straight sets, but four of the six sets ended 7-5 or 6-4. A weekend can be winless or winning by only a handful of late points. Doubles went USD's way on those margins every day; singles split them in the opposite direction after Friday.
That next competition is the ITA Southwest Regional Championships in Malibu from Oct. 15-20. The regional field will expand the consequence of each round and may change the doubles opponents quickly. Baena and Nagy leave the Veterans Classic with the most useful starting position available to a new team: a 3-0 record, three close-set finishes and no need to guess whether their basic partnership can hold under pressure.