The St. John’s men’s tennis team grabbed first place in the UPenn Invitational held on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 30.

Overall, their record for the event was 20-8.

“It is a tremendous win for us,” St. John’s coach Eric Rebhuhn said. “We had a slow start this fall but were able do well against the teams we played.”

The fourth seeded duo of Louis Desmarteaux and Aliaksandr Svetlakou defeated top-seeded Martin Sayer and James Lloyd of Radford and took first place.

Svetlakou competed in both the doubles and singles. Both were eliminated in the singles portion of the invitation. Desmarteaux had reached the second round before being defeated by Nickolai Nielsen of Maryland. Svetlakou had made it up to the quarterfinals until he was defeated in three sets by Navy’s Adrian Lai.

But Desmarteaux and Svetlakou had a second chance to taste victory when it came to the doubles competition. They started their day in the doubles tournament by doubling up Philip Gegenheimer and Matt Struble of Temple 8-4. Then, they advanced from the second round with a win over Jared Drucker and Dan Urban of Columbia, 8-5.

In the quarterfinals of the event, they ousted UPenn’s own Tas Tobais and Jimmy Fairbanks, 8-3. They reached the finals when they handed a loss to Maryland’s Michael Coleman and Louis-Xavier Lavalle.

For the event, St John’s sent out three players from the roster to compete in the ‘A’ group tournament, in which the participants were Desmarteaux, seniors David Nylen and Morgan Bauer. The three who competed in group ‘B’ were Claudio Halim, Jordan Talbot and Svetlakou.

Two pairs were made up of Svetlakou/Desmarteaux and Halim/Bauer to go into the doubles tourney.