Johnson City, Tenn. ? Five members of the 56^th-ranked Stetson men's tennis team were named to the Atlantic Sun All-Conference Teams last night, including First Team selections Marcus Echtler (Venice, Fla.) and unanimous pick Hicham Laalej (Meknes, Morocco).  The Hatters, seeded second in this weekend A-Sun championship tournament celebrated the achievement by blanking seventh-seeded Lipscomb 4-0.

In addition to Echtler and Laalej, senior Joey Jones (Titusville, Fla.) was named to the All-Atlantic Sun Second Team while rookies Gokay Celik (Istanbul, Turkey) and Christopher Swanteson (Vaxjo, Sweden) were selected to the A-Sun All-Freshman Team.

For Echtler, this is his fourth selection in as many years to the A-Sun First Team while Laalej, the 2007 A-Sun Player of the Year and Freshman of the Year, is on the First Team for the second time.  Jones was an All-Freshman pick in 2005 and was also Second Team All-Atlantic Sun two years ago in 2006.

In the match against Lipscomb, Stetson quickly got the four points necessary to win the match, which was cut short due to the time constraints of the A-Sun tournament.  Laalej and junior Filip Kricka (Umag, Croatia) won their doubles match 8-0 and the Echtler/Jones combination did the same by an 8-2 score to get the doubles point.

Moving to singles play, the first three matches ended in straight set victories for the Hatters, at which time the match was declared over.  Laalej blanked Jeff West 6-0, 6-0 at #2 singles, junior Serguei Boulanov (Venice, Fla.) beat Mario Hernandez 6-0, 6-3 at the #5 slot and Echtler finished off Daniel Hangstefer at the #1 position by a 6-3, 6-2 margin.

“This was a good start to the tournament for us,” Head Coach Pierre Pilote said.  “We knew we needed to get off the courts quickly to rest up for the semifinals and fortunately we were able to do that.”