NEW YORK — After a long day of waiting, No. 16 Columbia advanced to its second-straight NCAA Men's Tennis Sweet 16, winning its 10th-consecutive dual match with a 4-0 shutout win over No. 34 Penn State Saturday at Dick Savitt Tennis Center. With the victory, Columbia (19-3) completes its season with an undefeated 12-0 record at the Dick Savitt Tennis Center. Penn State concludes its year at 20-9.
 
The Sweet 16 berth marks the fourth all-time for Columbia, all of which have come under 37th-year Columbia head coach Bid Goswami. It's the second time the Lions have made back-to-back trips to the round of 16 after doing so in both the 2014 and 2015 campaigns.
 
"It feels really good," said Goswami after the match. "I think it's a great accomplishment. It's a great thing for the boys. Like I was telling them, some of the matches are a game of inches, but the practice we did, it's miles and yards of practice. I think it's the difference. The boys worked really hard the whole year, even with Jackie [Tang] getting hurt, which hurts us a lot, but other guys have stepped up. They're young guys, a lot of sophomores are playing well and I think it bodes well for the future."
 
"It feels amazing," said senior Victor Pham, who was named 2019 Ivy League Player of the Year and selected as an at-large qualifier for the NCAA Singles Tournament earlier this week. "It was a season-long goal to make it to the Sweet 16 and actually even beyond that, but we're setting ourselves up to reach our goal. It can be our last match every match basically with the single-elimination format, and to do it for Bid, it's his last season, so I think we're all really enjoying it. This is a really special crew, so I think we can go further."
 
Continuous rain pushed the start time of the match back by more than three hours after originally being scheduled for a noon start at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. After sitting for the extended time, officials made the call to move the contest to Columbia's indoor courts to begin at 3:30 p.m.
 
The waiting didn't seem to affect the No. 16 national seeded Lions, as Columbia got off to a strong start by claiming the doubles point with two decisive victories. The Lions got things started when sophomore Rian Pandole and senior Victor Pham defeated Penn State's Christian Lakoseljac and Christos Antonopoulos, 6-2, at No. 2 doubles. Columbia's 30th-ranked duo of William Matheson and Jack Lin clinched the point with a 6-3 win over Penn State's No. 45 pairing of Constant De La Bassetiere and Gabriel Nemeth at No. 1 doubles.
 
"The doubles point is so critical," said Goswami. "We lost a few doubles points this year. This year we lost the doubles point to Brown, to Princeton away, so I think it hardened us. We were not sure because one of the best guys went out in doubles, so we were still trying to find ourselves, but they kept working and I think we're finally getting the feel for doubles."
 
Showing the grit they have all season, Columbia battled through some tough singles play, grinding out first-set wins on five of the six courts.
 
Senior Timothy Wang put Columbia up by two when he registered a 6-4, 6-1 win over Penn State's Ben Lieb. Sophomore Austen Huang made it 3-0 when he finished off a 6-3, 6-0 win at No. 6 singles over Penn State's Alp Sentay.
 
At No. 3 singles, it was junior Adam Ambrozy, ranked No. 107 nationally, heroically battled back from a 4-2 deficit in the first-set tiebreaker to ultimately clinch the team victory for Columbia, winning 7-6 (4), 6-0 over Penn State's Gabriel Nemeth on court. The win comes just a week after Ambrozy helped Columbia win the outright Ivy League title, clinching the 4-2 win.
 
Saturday's contest was the first matchup for the two schools since Columbia and Penn State met in the 2016 NCAA Tournament in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Nittany Lions eliminated the Lions, 4-3, in a first round matchup that year. Senior Victor Pham, a first-year at the time, faced the same opponent from the 2016 match in De La Bassetiere.
 
Columbia will continue its 2019 NCAA Tournament run next weekend, travelling to Columbus, Ohio to face the tournament's No. 1 overall seed in Ohio State (29-2) in the NCAA Super Regional on Saturday, May 11 at 1 p.m. ET. Ohio State defeated both Cleveland State (4-0) and Vanderbilt (4-0) to advance in the opening rounds.
For the latest on the Columbia men's tennis, follow @ColumbiaMTennis on Twitter and Instagram, and on the web at GoColumbiaLions.com.