1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - Nebraska Men's Tennis Coach Peter Kobelt in studio: March 10th, 2026, 11:00am

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

It's Tuesday, which means Peter Kobelt is here LIVE on 1-on-1. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Coming at you live from the heart of Lincoln America on 93-7 the ticket and the ticketfm.com, sponsored by the downtown Lincoln Foundation. Here is your host, Derek Pearson. Tuesday, boom for you here from one-on-one on 93-7, The Ticket. Thanks for joining us today on this beautiful day here in Lincoln America. I am Jake Boccovin in the studio here with Nebraska men's tennis coach Peter Cobalt. DP will be joining us here in just a few minutes. He is on his way.

So going to be a great show today, two hours of one-on-one with DP today. And at least for the first hour, we got, we got Peter in here. Peter, you're going to be too busy. We'll keep you for two hours. I don't think I can do two. Okay, well, then we better get the information out in one. Let's do it. All right, fair enough.

It is interesting. Of course, I want to go ahead and give you the Florida kind of break down what's coming up this week and you're explaining to me. It's going to be a big one for Nebraska men's tennis. Yeah, we got a big weekend. We're in our big 10 season now. So this weekend we got Illinois at home. Illinois is number nine in the country.

So a top 10 matchup here at the Sid and Hazel Dillon Tennis Center on Friday, Friday night at 6 o'clock. And then Sunday, we turn around, quick turnaround. We got another top 45 team in Northwestern coming to town, too. Both teams are excellent. Both teams have made huge improvements from last year to, this year. And just like every other sport, the Big Ten's absolutely nails. So we're going to need a big crowd. We're going to need a lot of support. So we're counting on all you guys to come out.

As always, it's free. Free parking, free admissions. If you want some snacks or a cold beverage of your choice, those are also available for purchase at the concession stand on Friday night. Yeah, going to be a big top 10 matchup or top 10 team coming in. in so could be a big, hopefully Nebraska can get the win would be a huge momentum changer for the program here as we move forward.

It's kind of interesting because as I kind of start to learn a little bit more about the game of tennis and here at the college level, I was talking to Herman yesterday about the, you know, on the women's side, about some of the stuff that goes on a little bit off the court. And he was explaining to me, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it

because it was the most fascinating thing in the world to me, the idea of stacking and protesting. And how this happens. I had no idea that this was the case. For those that didn't listen the other day, what am I talking about when I say stacking and protesting? Yeah, so you have to submit a lineup later today, actually, for us. That's why we can't do two hours.

There's a lot of work still to do. On Tuesdays, you have to submit your lineup to the Big Ten commissioner for tennis. And the teams vote. But basically the teams all see the lineups that are submitted and they have until tomorrow at noon to protest any of the lineups. And if you don't protest the lineups, then that's the lineup that has to be submitted for the match on Friday. On Sunday, you're allowed to move your players around one spot.

But it kind of just eliminates any funny business going into some of these matches and allows you kind of just to focus on what you need to do and, you know, going into that first match at least, kind of who's going to be playing, who allows you to prepare, honestly, a little bit better because most of the time you don't know until about an hour before the match who's playing what.

So for me, I think it's a good thing. It allows you to prepare for not just the University of Illinois or Northwestern, but it allows you to prepare for a specific person because everyone's looking to move guys around based on how they're doing or matchups or things like this. So that's kind of how it works with tennis. Yeah. And then, I mean, I'm just fascinated

because it gets, you know, it kind of gets into the deeper conversations of how often does protesting happen. I was talking with Herman about it. He said, at least for the women's side, it's anonymous if somebody does protest or can be, and he voted that it would not be. Is it similar for the men's side? I didn't know it was anonymous on the women's side. No, it's absolutely not anonymous on the men's side.

We had one last week in Wisconsin challenged Michigan State, and it got overruled. So we actually had a protest, and it, they went through. So I don't know. It's not super, super common, but if there's something that's egregious or something that doesn't look right, the coaches aren't afraid to protest. That's kind of how it works. Yeah, yeah, completely fascinating to me. And then, of course, from there, you kind of get into the discussion of, okay, if the protest, you know, a protest does kind of take place, all that sort of stuff. What are the feelings going around? And it's competitive. Everybody's just trying to obviously get their best lineups out there and try to

win. But how close is the men's tennis coaching community? Do you guys have like a Big Ten group chat or is it not not like that? We do have a Big Ten group chat. It's not, there's not much texting going on. Especially this time of the year. Yeah. More for some bigger, bigger issues in terms of just college tennis and how we want the Big Ten to look and things like that. But, but yeah, I mean, everyone's trying to win. You know, the margins are tiny. everyone kind of keeps their tries to keep their cards close to their chest. We're very careful who we call and talk to,

who we trust and who we share information with. Because it's an information game just like it is for everyone else. But you're just trying to position your guys the best you can. And sometimes you're able to do a better job of it than other weeks. And at the end of the day, it's up to us to get them prepared

for our team to play their best and compete their best. And however the, you know, the match goes is how the match goes and we just got to keep improving as a team and as a program and that's kind of you know goal number one yeah yeah interesting stuff again a little bit of off the court type of stuff there uh want to get onto the onto the court of course as well uh this past weekend a trip to to michigan state and michigan um dropped those games but of course there can be positives through through that as well uh what was kind of your breakdown from this past week in the trips to east lansing and ann arbor

Yeah, 100%. I thought the match against Michigan State, I thought they came out and they played really well. I felt like they were the better team that day pretty clearly. But come on, D.P. Let's go. There we go. And then, you know, I thought we figured a few things out, though, that match. And we went to the Michigan match.

They have a, you know, one of our players against Michigan State beat a top top 11 player in the country. Wow. Nico took down the number 11 player in the country, which was a huge win for him.

And then on Sunday, I thought we actually, I told the guys after the match, I was like, hey, if that's the team that's going to come out and play every single match, the rest of the year,

I'll go to war with you guys every single day. So I was really proud of how the guys did. On Sunday, even though we lost, Michigan's arguably got the best player

in college, tennis playing number one for him. And our guy, Leo, took him to resets. I think you might have been not feeling his best, the guy from Michigan. But if you're going to go out there and play, then the expectation is you're good enough to play. And we played them tight. And it was really close. Everything on the road is tough. You know, in tennis, it's not like basketball where the floor is the same, the ball is the same. You know, you get a few shots and you're kind of acclimated. to get used to the to the altitude the ball skidding on the court the surf it takes time to find your your rhythm and your range so you got to practice and try and get as you know as acclimated

as you possibly can and it's tough to do so it comes down to you know a team that's plays there 200 days a year and you're playing there your second day really and you got to go beat a team it's so it's it's not easy but uh i took a lot of comments from this weekend. I honestly feel way better going in to our next match than I've felt after any other match we've played this year. I told the guys that too. And I say we need to bottle this up and take it with us the rest of the year because I think we're starting to figure out who we are and figure out some doubles teams, figure out what we need to do in singles. I think we're actually growing more now than we have prior to any of the other matches earlier on in the year.

Absolutely. Let's go ahead and bring in a DP here as DP we're talking about. Of course, this past weekend against Michigan State and Michigan kind of recapping what went on there ahead of a big weekend at the Sid and Hazel Dillon Center this, this upcoming weekend with Illinois Northwestern coming to town. So for me and tracking it while on the road, it's always interesting. I still want to somehow get my hands inside the Husker Athletic Department to give some additional juice to how they cover you guys. but because I mean getting the video of it changes the way the perception of

and I think making it more friend friendly and follower friendly to be able to get the information to get the data to know who the young people are know who they're playing the the profiles that kind of be done the matchups that you send out that don't reach everybody right because if you know that you're facing the number one player of the country, the attention grows. Absolutely. Right. So is there a way in your mind to get that information, not only the profiles of your players, and we have to, we also have to do better at profiling your players, but to get those stories out there for people, the more emotionally invested they become, the more they emotionally support. Yeah, I think there's a way to do it better.

I don't know if there's a, there's a perfect way. I think it's a little bit like in another sport, we'll go with football where you have projected starters and then, you know, they roll out there and they have a new guy left tackle or right, or you hear murmurs about it. Like, you know, I, no one's calling my phone asking how's, how we looking physically this week. Well, I know not to do that, even though I want, like, I want to go, I want, like, I want to come in the practice and saying like, ooh, it doesn't look like Nico's doing so well this week. I don't think he's going to play. But you wouldn't tell us if it were true. Absolutely. I don't think that's what the football staff is doing either.

True. But yeah, I mean, I think there's ways to say, like, look, this has kind of been Nebraska tennis's top six, the last couple matches, if this is the projected lineup. And if we look at the projected lineup from Illinois, the last five matches, this is kind of these. When did you know what the lineup is going to be?

Well, I was just telling, on, Bach, for the Big Ten season, we have to submit our lineups on Tuesdays. So today, we have to have it in by 7 p.m. tonight. And then we have until tomorrow at noon to protest the lineup if we want to. So we'll have the official lineups of our matchups Wednesday afternoon, at least in singles. And then how do you announce it to the team? Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we work on these things without them knowing.

If we feel like some of the guys do better when they know the matchups, sometimes when they, when they have too long to think about it. It gets in their head a little bit. Okay. It just kind of depends on each player on our team and how they handle information. Some of them want a lot of information. Some of them don't want any. They just want to go play.

And so there's that. And then also you can, there's still a chance for the team that you're playing to pull a player. So say someone gets sick and they pull their number one player. Now everyone on the team's playing against somebody new. So you prepare to play against one. guy and then, you know, the sheet gets ripped out from underneath the table and all the silverware is on the ground and you got to put it all back on there real quick. So you try and do, you try and do your best to prepare the guys the best you can. And then tennis is a game where

you have to be very adaptable and you're going to have to guard or play against a guy that can do a couple different things. You're trying to prepare for one player maybe. And then in the back your head there's a 10 or 20% chance that something can happen and you've got to be ready to play somebody else and you're not in the in the regular business of pulling players illness sickness usually that last minute deal is emergency only kind of only you know if fire break break glass yeah there's times where you know we we have an idea and we want you know we think this this could this could this could work out better than that and then throughout the week you see you see you see things at practice, you see how the guys are doing.

Sometimes, yeah, like, they'll get sick and you're like, ah, you know, like, or they'll, you know, the trainer will come up and say, hey, like, you struggle a little bit with this or that. And then you go into the match, you're like, okay, like if, you know, sometimes if you lose the doubles point, if you win the doubles point, you can, you make a change, or you don't make a change in singles based on that. And you're trying to find four points. At the end of the day, it's, you know, there's seven points available and you're trying to find the math to get to four.

the best you can. So sometimes that means just playing your lineup the way it is and sometimes you might pull a guy out of the lineup to slide another guy down. We're fortunate to have nine guys that I think that can really play for us.

So we have options and I think when you have options you have to always consider all your options or else you're not doing your team it's due diligence. So for me that's kind of what coaching is for tennis. I would love if tennis made some changes.

If we were allowed to call timeouts, we're not allowed to call timeout, we're not allowed to make a substitution. I think that would be absolutely electric and dynamic for tennis. But it's hard because whatever, you know, we have to decide on our lineup today

and we don't know what the guys are going to be like on Friday. And you can't really change. You can't really make any changes. So you have to do your best and try and put out the best lineup that you think is going to suit your team the best on Friday,

and you kind of got to make the most out of it. Yeah, I just spent the weekend with the wrestlers, and there's a bit of the gladiator thing that happens that you're out there. You're out there. It's you one-on-one against somebody. Coaches can yell, scream, whisper. In the end, you've got to have conversations with yourself

to get you through it. You're out there by yourself. I do like the idea of like a one-time substitution. I think it'd be great. You know, just bringing a reliever to serve for the match. I don't know. Someone's something happens and something gets hurt. Who would be against that?

I think, I don't know. I don't know. Like the players wouldn't seem to mind, right? Because that's just how it works. Coaches would love the strategy behind it. Yeah, I think it's, yeah. And I think, you know, the players, if I were a player and I wasn't in the top six, I still feel like, okay, like, I got to be ready.

There's a chance. you know, I could go in and you could set a minimum number of games and a maximum number of games that they could. I don't know. Yeah, I think there's a whole lot of wrinkles to it. You know, you might have to decide after the first set, something like that or something along those lines. But it gives your guys that gives your guys some a chance to say, okay, like I can still get in this match. I got to be ready. And as a coach, you're like, okay, if something goes wrong, I have a, I have a card. I can still pull and make it, make a change if I need to. Yeah, that kind of, for me, that's kind of what coaching on at least game day is. I think there's a lot of different variables of coaching, but on game day, as a coach, your hands are kind of tied in terms of moving guys around and finding matchups and other sports. That's really what it's all about, you know, football, you're literally doing that every single play.

In basketball, I would, I would assume is very much the same, trying to find matchups, expose matchups, get guys on different guys, you know, find holes. do this and do that in tennis. It's like, hey, you got to go one-on-one against this guy and figure it out within the point. So it's just different. But I think being able to have some more variables inside the game would make it more fun. Yeah, I think the fans, given that opportunity, knowing that you had a big server sitting over there for when you need two out of three games to end it, to close the set out. Yeah, like a baseball reliever. Yeah. I would, I would assume it's a lot like a starting pitcher and then you have your relieving,

you're relieving pictures that come in and very, have specialized roles. I think. think it, you know, I could, I could open up a whole new can of worms for tennis, in my opinion. That would, that would be, that would be pretty cool. Bach, let's go to break. I need to reset. I got caught by the time change bandit at home. I got in last night and my wife's clock was right. My clock next to my bed, next to my, on my nightstander was an hour behind.

And I walk out into the kitchen and went, oh, no, it's an hour ahead. I thought I had an extra hour, failure. I've in 35 plus years. I've never been late for sure. Today's the first. I am going through some stuff mentally. Like, I am fighting the fight that I've never been late. Today is the first.

So, Bach, let me get some coffee in me and set up my computer one-on-one Peter Crowbell. Bach will be right back. Download our app by searching 93.7, a ticket in your app store. You're listening to one-on-one with DP on 93-7 the Ticket and the Ticketfm.com.