Sitting in the college tennis hall of fame, surrounded by trophies and history, junior Dylan Dietrich mentally prepared himself for his final set of the season. He had a 10-minute break from the sweltering 90-degree heat, from the noise, from the pressure.
“Remind for me every point to breathe and grunt,” he said to Assistant Coach Brian Rasmussen, knowing that he would need a mental reset after every point, win or lose.
Minutes later, Dietrich saw sophomore Jangjun Kim win a second-set tiebreak 11-9, tying the title match at 3-3. Then it hit him.
Match tied, national title on the line, the opponent’s top player on the other side. His doubles partner and best friend, senior Måns Dahlberg, watching him from the sidelines, alongside the rest of his team. The moment every tennis player — every athlete — dreams of.
“This is what you dream about,” Dietrich said. “You have dreams of that the night before the matches. This is as good as it gets.”
The pressure did not hit him immediately, not until he went down a break after putting his return of No. 3 senior Sebastian Gorzny’s serve into the net. The dream then became, in Dietrich’s words, a nightmare.
“Oh there was so much pressure,” Dietrich said. “That moment was just horrible for a few points.”
Virginia tennis fans will talk about the match’s final point for a long time — Dietrich’s second serve breaking the silence, then an eruption of cheers when Gorzny’s return hit the net. Dietrich hurled his cap and wristband into the air before being swarmed by his team. A third championship in five years, a seventh all-time.
But there were moments before that fateful final point, both for Dietrich and the team as a whole.
For Dietrich, one such moment came eight points after his dream turned to nightmare. A lucky bounce on a return kept the point alive on deuce. A crosscourt backhand then forced Gorzny to lunge for a volley, swinging the rally’s advantage to the Cavaliers’ star. Two big forehands later, Dietrich had put himself back in the set.
“I was praying Hail Marys the entire third set,” Coach Andres Pedroso said. “And she came through.”
Dietrich knows he got lucky with the bounce off the tape on his return, but, as he put it, the team has earned that luck.
“We've worked hard,” Dietrich said. “[We’ve] hung in there every point and gave ourselves the best chance.”
In the Cavaliers’ run to the NCAA Final, they had to earn their luck over and over. Doubles woes and slow starts in singles forced them to play from behind in several duals, and in every case they managed to work themselves back from the jaws of defeat.
First against Columbia in just the second round of the tournament, Virginia dropped the doubles point then lost four first sets in singles. Down 2-0 after a loss on Court 5, the Cavaliers then won four straight singles matches to clinch the dual, three of them in third sets.
The next weekend, against South Carolina, they won the doubles point, but dropped a whopping five first sets in singles. To some in the Boar’s Head stands, the season looked like it would soon be over.
After a win over Mississippi State in the quarterfinals — one that did not require a comeback but still asked a lot of the young Cavaliers — Coach Pedroso and his squad would face a familiar opponent in the semifinals, Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons looked like title favorites, having defeated the Cavaliers in both the regular season and ACC Tournament final, one of just two teams with wins over Virginia this season.
Again, the Cavaliers would have to play from behind. Dietrich evened the score at 1-1 after Wake Forest won doubles, but losses on Court 6, then Court 2 put the Demon Deacons up 3-1. It took third-set wins on three courts for Virginia to move on.
Pedroso credits the program’s culture for those comeback victories that characterized the Cavaliers’ run. The brotherhood that is Virginia men’s tennis is fueled by a shared competitiveness and fighting for each other, which allows them to work themselves back into matches and will the team toward victory.
“These guys had to resurrect themselves and soul search and just go into really dark places to find ways to win in the middle of matches,” Pedroso said. “It's just one comeback after the other.”
That culture and mentality have allowed Virginia to be a team that plays some of its best tennis in May, when each point, game and set simply means more. And, when Dietrich entered the final, winner-takes-all set against Gorzny, Pedroso asked his team to show just that.
“I was telling [them], ‘Let’s see the culture,’” Pedroso said. “‘Show me the culture. Put it on display.’ That’s what I was telling [them]. ‘Give everything you can to Dylan [Dietrich]. Show how much you love him. Show him how close you are to him. Show him the friendship you have with him. Show him that you’ve got his back no matter what. Show me the culture. Show me the culture.’”
On the sideline, lined shoulder to shoulder with his teammates, senior Måns Dahlberg watched his doubles partner and best friend enter that pivotal final set. The two of them had won the NCAA doubles championship together in November, and Dahlberg is one of three players on the roster to have been there when the Cavaliers last won the national championship in 2023.
Dahlberg lost his match on Court 6, and had spent some time already processing the defeat. But by the time Dietrich and Gorzny kicked off their third set, he was all in on supporting his friend.
“He's someone everybody looks up to,” Dahlberg said. “There's no one I have more faith in than Dylan.”
As Dietrich stood on the baseline on Court 1, he found himself leaning on that relationship, too.
“Just looking at Måns out there,” Dietrich said. “Because he's my best friend, and just making sure I leave it all out there for him was just the most important part for me.”
Virginia men’s tennis’ 2026 NCAA Tournament run eventually came down to one moment — a second serve, a return that flew too low and the subsequent euphoria of victory — but the path to that minute was charted in relationships, culture and the times that the Cavaliers refused to let dreams become nightmares, the times that they earned their luck.
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