Time is running out for Illinois men’s tennis.

After suffering two “disappointing” losses in as many weeks to Minnesota and Michigan, head coach Brad Dancer said his team received its wake-up call and will need to perform “substantially better” if it has any hope of making a run at the NCAA tournament.

“(The coaching staff) has talked a lot about what’s got to happen, but the talk has probably got to stop and action needs to get going,” Dancer said.

The wake-up call may be too little, too late, as Illinois (12-8, 5-2 Big Ten) will start the weekend against No. 5 Ohio State (24-2, 7-0) — arguably its toughest match of the schedule — before closing with Penn State (8-12, 2-5) on Sunday.

Collectively, the team isn’t hurting in one specific area. Sophomore Ross Guignon said each player has his own thing to work to improve, such as he needs to work on focusing on his court instead of keeping track of what his teammates are doing.

“Six people have to play with intent and purpose,” Dancer said. “We didn’t come close to that in Michigan. When you play with intent and purpose, you put yourself in at least a position to win.”

Illinois’ doubles game has picked up in the past few weeks, and they are now 10-10 in doubles after starting the spring season at 1-6. Dancer said the Illini has played with a high level of intensity in doubles all season, but it wasn’t until they began playing with composure that the team made its turnaround.

Meanwhile, Guignon and fellow sophomore Tim Kopinski have been a destructive force for the Illini as a tandem, having put up an 8-4 record together. They moved to No. 19 after defeating then-No. 12 Michigan duo Evan King and Shaun Bernstein.

But the Illini doubles game isn’t completely grounded yet.

“We’ve got to figure out, going into tournament time when you don’t get to move them around, what we think overall is going to be our three best doubles teams, and we’re still working on that,” Dancer said.

Even with Guignon and Kopinski together, the Illini are expected to have a fight on their hands with the Buckeyes, who boast three ranked doubles pairs — No. 16 Peter Kobelt and Connor Smith, No. 32 Devin McCarthy and Ille Van Engelen and No. 33 Blaz Rola and Kevin Metka, respectively.

Singles holds similar doubts with No. 36 freshman Jared Hiltzik leading the Illini squad against a Buckeye roster that features five players in the top-100, two of whom are top-10 players.

“Brad sort of gets us in this mindset of taking it match-by-match,” Guignon said. “He’s lost to Ohio State a lot of times, and so he’s sort of dealt with it in this way and that way, and I think this is the way he wants us to go at it.”

From this view, Illinois — sitting at third in the Big Ten — is a favorite in its second match of the weekend against a Penn State team that lines the bottom of the conference. But splitting a conference weekend isn’t going to cut it for Illinois, and the team recognizes the importance of beating Ohio State.

“It’s not our first top-seven team this year, and we beat two of them,” senior Stephen Hoh said. “We’ve got confidence that we can do it again.”

J.J. can be reached at [email protected] and @wilsonable07.