RALEIGH, N.C. – The men's tennis team heads south this weekend for a non-league match at 10 a.m. Sunday against North Carolina State.
 
The 44th-ranked Big Red is coming off a pair of losses last weekend at the ITA Kick-Off Weekend regional held in Columbus, Ohio. Cornell (2-2) dropped the opener to host No. 3 Ohio St., then fell to No. 28 Notre Dame in the consolation match the following day.
 
Sophmore Venkat Iyer, ranked 98th nationally and fourth in the Northeast Region, won his match at No. 1 singles after the Big Red secured the doubles point with victories from the all-freshman teams of Quoc-Daniel Nguyen and Alex Sidney, and Sam Fleck and Jason Luu. The Big Red defeated Buffalo and Boston College to kick off the winter portion of its schedule.
 
North Carolina State (5-1) is ranked 57th, having also competed in a different regional of the ITA Kick-Off Weekend. The Wolfpack suffered its first loss of the season against No. 7 Kentucky, then rebound with a 4-0 sweep of No. 58 Eastern Tennessee State.
 
Freshman Austin Powell is the Wolfpack's lone representative in the national rankings for singles, coming in at No. 100. He is 4-0 on the season, but played two matches at No. 4 and the others at No. 2 and No. 5. Senior Jaime Pulgar is 4-1 at the No. 1 spot with senior Dominic Hodgson and freshman Robbie Mudge typically following him in the lineup. Pulgar, a native Spaniard, has earned All-ACC honors for the last two seasons and missed all fall college tournament play while competing in Spain, Kuwait and India on the ITF Futures Tour.
 
Cornell is 7-0 all-time against N.C. State. The first match was in 1938, with all of the matches in the series coming before Wolfpack records began in 1956.