The USF men’s tennis team hopes to get back to its winning ways after losing to FSU 5-2 Friday.

Before the match against the Seminoles, the Bulls were winners in five of their last six matches.

Coming off a disappointing loss to their in-state rival, the Bulls look to bounce back when the Auburn Tigers come to town today at 2.

Senior Jorge Escallon and he knew the Seminoles would give them a tough match, but he didn’t realize how tough until both teams took to the court.

“They wanted to beat us bad since we’ve beat them in the past few meetings,” he said. “I don’t think we played our doubles matches very strong. We just weren’t on the same page as them.”

The Bulls lost two of three doubles matches as Uli Kiendl and Juan Barragan defeated Alex Herrera and Hagen Endler 9-8 for the lone win.

USF coach Don Barr said the loss to Florida State was indeed disappointing and winning against Auburn today will help ease the pain of that bad match.

“It’s coming down to the end of the season, and we need to be at what I call our ‘A level,'” Barr said. “In order to get to that level, we need to play our very best at the end of the season and enter the Conference USA tournament with our confidence high.”

The Auburn Tigers seem to be on a streak of luck in Tampa, as their basketball team survived the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, including an upset of No. 2 seed Wake Forest.

Ranked No. 23 in the country, the Tigers men’s tennis team is coming off three tough wins against Mississippi State, Arizona State and Marquette.

“Auburn is a really good team. Lately, we haven’t felt any pressure to play our best game, but now is our time to play our ‘A’ game against them,” Barr said. “We have the advantage of playing on our home court. We need to go after them hard.”