“I thought if I was going to try out college coaching, there was only one place that I’d try it,” London explained, “and that’s here, under [Harvard coach Dave Fish ’72], so things just kind of fit.”

This weekend might not have been the best introduction to collegiate coaching for London, though the doubles teams did fare significantly better than did the singles players.

The sophomore duo of Max Tedaldi and Scott Denenberg lost 9-8 (2) in the second round, while the senior pair of Beren and Jordan Bohnen advanced to the semifinals before losing 8-4.

The big winners of the weekend were senior Jonathan Chu and sophomore Gideon Valkin. The two were not doubles partners last year, but they had little trouble dispatching a team from Brown 8-4 after going up by an initial 6-0 mark.

And so, with the tennis season officially underway, the Crimson has both much to anticipate and much to build upon.

“We have a quite different team this year,” said senior Martin Wetzel. “We still have lots of talent in our team, and I would say that we do not have a worse team compared to last year, but just a younger and less experienced one.”

Which is why London isn’t too broken up about the weekend’s losses.

“No one day is really disappointing,” he explained. “You look at the whole year, and if [players] can take all the disappointments of today and turn them into positives so that they’re not disappointments when it’s actually a more important part of the season, then this becomes really useful.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.