SANTIAGO, Chile — In spite of their campaign ending without a medal, tennis players Rowland “Randy” Phillips and Blaise Bicknell are seeing positives from their participation in the Pan American Games this week.

The duo lost 6-3, 6-2 to Brazil’s Gustavo Heidi and Marcelo Demoliner in the men’s doubles quarter-finals on Thursday, and Bicknell lost in the quarter-final of the men’s singles tournament against Chilean Tomás Barrios, who was playing at centre court with loud support from the home fans earlier on Thursday afternoon.

“Today was a bit disappointing,” Phillips said. “We didn’t play as we wanted to, but overall, I’d say it’s definitely a positive tournament and positive performance. We’re playing well together, so we can build from it.”

Bicknell, who is disappointed to have lost both games on the day, said while it was physically demanding to play that much tennis in a few hours, it’s no excuse for the result in the latter game. He describes the performance in the doubles game as being flat at times.

“The opponents capitalised on that and it was just tough today, but overall, as Randy said, it was a great week to build on,” Bicknell said.

Bicknell lost the singles game 3-6, 7-6, 2-6.

Bicknell started slowly, with a number of errors in his serves and the first set quickly got away from him.

Barrios probably thought he had the victory sealed in the second set, with the score at 5-3, but Bicknell started to fight back and had a response to every return Barrios served up. At this point, Bicknell’s forehand also became too much for Barrios, who made a series of errors of his own, even with the crowd loudly cheering him on. Bicknell took the game back to 6-6, before claiming the tiebreaker 7-2.

The Jamaican started the third and final set stronger than Barrios and took the first game, but Barrios found his nerve to take the set 6-2 and advance to the semi-finals.

Bicknell came into this game as the 426th seeded player in the world, and 15th seed in the tournament, while Barrios, seeded 105th in the world, was the Pan Am Games second seed.

Heidi is seeded 202nd in the world, while Demoliner is 76th.

Bicknell and Phillips’ opening-round opponents were Americans Evan Zhu (379) and Omni Kumar (354th).

Phillips (1780th) also had a creditable opening round singles performance in spite of losing to Colombia’s Nicolas Mejia (330th).

He is taking value from playing against the calibre of opponents that they did.

“It’s great to be around a lot of highly ranked professionals and see how they go about their training and matches,” Phillips said. “We can learn from really good players that are here but also, it’s good to see that we’re competing at this level and able to beat and compete at the highest level with these guys.”

Their trainer Christopher Paul commends them for their spirit and says the Games will prove to be a valuable learning experience for them.

“It’s a great feeling just to be able to come out and compete on a daily basis, knowing we have a chance to win every time we come out,” he said. “It’s not like we came out not expecting to win, but at the end of the day, we have to just grow and continue to grow and get better each day.”

Jamaica’s only other Pan Am Games action on the day came in cycling. Dahlia Palmer, who earned the country’s first medal, a bronze in the women’s keirin final, had a difficult campaign in the women’s sprint qualification.

She placed 17th in 11.693 seconds.