When Danny Kerzman and the men’s tennis team traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to compete in the 2014 Harvard Chowdah Fest, he took the court as a member of the Alabama Crimson Tide for the first time. On the final day of the tournament, Kerzman, a freshman from Brooklyn, New York, secured his first win representing Alabama.

“It felt awesome,” Kerzman said. “The first few days I was thinking about it too much, but I finally got it and it felt great.”

This weekend, Kerzman will play in his second tournament with the Crimson Tide, as the team hosts the Crimson Tide Four-In-The-Fall, taking place Friday through Sunday at the Alabama Tennis Stadium. The compass-style tournament will feature three singles draws of 16 players, as well as three doubles draws with eight pairs competing in each.

Freshman Sam Edwards will also take the court for his first home tournament this weekend. So far this season, Alabama has been a great place to develop his game surrounded by coaches and teammates, and he is looking forward to his first home experience.

“I’m really excited,” Edwards said. “I feel like it will be great to play in front of our friends and a lot of our family will be in town, so it will just be a really cool experience competing on our home courts.”

Eleven teams in addition to Alabama will be represented in Tuscaloosa this weekend: Notre Dame, Illinois, Middle Tennessee State, Florida State, Rice, South Alabama, Tulane, UAB, Dartmouth, Princeton and Samford University.

Coach George Husack said the fall portion of the 
tennis season is all about new experiences, which will be accomplished by hosting such a variety of teams this weekend with each player guaranteed seven matches.

“The fall is all about experiencing something new and different,” Husack said. “Harvard was different, this is going to be different. The one consistent thing is that we’re going to get a lot of matches out of the weekend, so that’s a good thing.”

After competing in the Chowdah Fest, team members reviewed their performance, looking for areas that needed improvements. Husack said this weekend he expects his team to have addressed those areas.

“Each guy wrote down things he needed to work on between then and the upcoming tournament,” Husack said. “The improvements they needed to make from the last tournament, they need to have made by this tournament so we can scratch them off the list and move on.”