Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds

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RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - BostonCard - 05-12-2018

Doubles has started, and we are up a break 3-2 in two of the matches, down a break 2-3 in the third. Streaming can be had here:

http://streamingtennis.com/Cardinal/

But it isn't working for me.

BC

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Lorcan - 05-12-2018

(05-12-2018, 04:30 PM)BostonCard Wrote: Doubles has started, and we are up a break 3-2 in two of the matches, down a break 2-3 in the third. Streaming can be had here:

http://streamingtennis.com/Cardinal/

But it isn't working for me.

BC

The stream is working for me.

http://streamingtennis.com/Cardinal/court2.html
[url=http://streamingtennis.com/Cardinal/court2.html][/url]

Court 2 goes up 4-2 on a deciding point, Number 3 claws back to 3-3 on a deciding point. Amazing how those points make all the difference.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - BostonCard - 05-12-2018

We lose court 1 6-4; we win court 2 6-4; and court 3 is all knotted up at 5.

BC

(05-12-2018, 04:54 PM)BostonCard Wrote: We lose court 1 6-4; we win court 2 6-4; and court 3 is all knotted up at 5.

BC

Tiebreaker.

BC

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Lorcan - 05-12-2018

Wow. They go down 5-0 in the breaker, but reel off seven straight points to claim the doubles point. Talk about clutch. Lord's swinging volley to clinch was emphatic.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - BostonCard - 05-12-2018

We win the double's point on a tiebreaker; it looks like we were down 5-0, and came roaring back with 7 straight points to win!

BC

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - StanfordMatt - 05-12-2018

Wow. #3 lost the first five points only to win seven in a row to win the tiebreak and claim the dubs point. Don't see that everyday. Should provide some momentum going into singles.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Lorcan - 05-12-2018

Higuchi the first one off with a 6-1 6-0 win. Card lead 2-0.

Wow. You weren't kidding about Minor. Melissa Lord demolishes the defending national champion 6-1 6-2. Stanford leads 3-0, with Shin up 3-0 in the second. Arbuthnott fighting back after dropping the first 3-1 in the second. Gordon also dropped the first, but Lampl won hers in a breaker.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - ColoradoTree - 05-12-2018

Once that doubles tiebreaker went our way, I figured we’d be in great shape, but I didn’t think that great a shape.

* Higuchi at 6 just isn’t fair. So few teams in the country have our depth. (Of course, we’ll play one of them in the next round.)

* Guess we figured out which Lord would show up, eh? I’ve been waiting all season to see her play at that level. Not her fault we haven’t—after all, she missed all but the last month of the regular season with injury—but we’re finally seeing the player who was the preseason #7 player in the country. Minor is good, too, and Lord just blew her off the court. When Lord is at her best, she can beat anyone in the country.

* 4-0 looks like a blowout, but those of you that followed this one know the score line is misleading. But heck, we just blanked the #17 team in the country, and the three matches that got finished weren’t close. (Still amped from that doubles point, tbh.) 4 first sets when we just needed three wins, and we were on our way to forcing one of Michigan’s two first set wins into a third. (I know it was tied 4-4, but that match had “Arbuthnott comeback classic” written all over it.) We had that one reasonably well in hand throughout the singles.

* Shin at 5 was just terrific. Clinching a NCAA win is quite the thing, and being able to finish that off should be a nice boost of confidence going forward.

* Good fight from Lampl at 3, down a break early, but fighting to get it to a tiebreaker and then pulling it out. She was on serve in her second set when the match was abandoned, but if we’d needed that one, I feel like Caroline would have gotten us home.

* Arbuthnott struggled somewhat today, but it felt like she’d righted the ship in the second.

* The only blemish on the day was Gordon having set points up 5-4 on her serve and then losing 8 straight games—8!—before holding to stave off Fahey’s win and allow Shin to close out her match and preserve the shutout. That is a worrying lapse in form, and she’s had some trouble finishing off sets and matches this year. She avoids taking a loss today, so hopefully it’s a wake up call. (It doesn't count for ITA ranking purposes, that is. But for UTR purposes, in case you're curious, the match does count, because it counts matches where at least four games have been played, so it should cause Gordon's rating to dip a little. The UTR system sees that Gordon won 6 games and lost 12, and it's the percentage of games won that matters, so it counts it the same as if Gordon had actually lost 6-3, 6-3.)

The road only gets tougher from here, folks. We play top-ranked—but 2nd-seeded—UNC in the Round of 16 at Wake Forest on Thursday at noon, in what might as well be a road match. A rough draw, but we’d have to beat them anyway, so we might as well do it Thursday.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Canalejas - 05-12-2018

All but 2 seeded teams (Florida and Oklahoma State) advanced to the round of 16.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - BostonCard - 05-12-2018

Also today; the men blanked New Mexico State 4-0.

BC

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - PVTree - 05-12-2018

(05-12-2018, 08:16 PM)Canalejas Wrote: All but 2 seeded teams (Florida and Oklahoma State) advanced to the round of 16.

Glad that Florida lost. They are one of the few teams that are thorns on our side.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - StanfordMatt - 05-13-2018

Men's team in a battle with Ole Miss. Tied 3-3 overall with deciding match about to start a third set at #6. Genesen had 4 match points in 2nd set but couldn't convert. Let's Go Stanford!

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Spiny_Norman - 05-13-2018

Momentum to Mississippi. Their #6 has broken Genesen twice to win 3 straight games for a 3-2 lead in the deciding set. Genesen had a break point in game 4 but hit a return long. He seems to be making a lot more unforced errors than his opponent.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Treefence - 05-13-2018

Boy Genesen is really collapsing. Was up a serve with a chance to win the match. Then was up 6-3 in the tiebreak and lost. Now was up 2-0 in the third set and has lost 4 straight. Need him to hold serve then get a break.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Canalejas - 05-13-2018

Yikes. That was a tough way to go out.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - StanfordMatt - 05-13-2018

Incredibly disappointing way to go out. This team was playing as well as anyone in the country three months ago but steadily declined from there. Even still, I didn’t expect to lose to an Ole Miss team that needed to upset Duke just to make the second round.

Overall, still pleased with how Goldstein has righted the ship since taking over for Whitlinger, but there will be lots of questions entering next year. Losing Fawcett will obviously be a big hole to fill as will Fomba and Wilczynski who were consistent performers at #4 and #5, respectively (all three won today). I also wouldn’t be shocked if Geller reconsiders going pro. No inside info but he entered Stanford as the top ranked junior in the world and many were surprised that he chose to play college tennis in the first place. He clearly regressed over the course of the year; you have to wonder if he decides that college tennis simply isn’t for him.

On the bright side, the incoming recruiting class includes two more blue chips to go along with two blue chip freshman who didn’t see much action in singles this year. In particular, I’d expect Timothy Sah to play a much bigger role after mainly playing #3 doubles this season.

Let’s hope the women can carry the torch in Winston-Salem.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - ColoradoTree - 05-14-2018

To add insult to injury, this was the first time a top-4 seed has failed to advance to the Round of 16 since the field expanded to 64 teams. So, uh, we've got that going for us.

I heard some chatter that Ole Miss was underranked because it was now healthy and hadn't been for much of the year. Maybe so. Still no excuse when you're ranked as highly as Stanford was.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - Hulk01 - 05-14-2018

In warmups, Lord looked like I hadn't seen her all year. Like a whole 'nother player.
I'd written off the points at #2. No longer.

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - ColoradoTree - 05-14-2018

So, just like two years ago, we get a match worthy of a final in the Round of 16 on the women's side. I'll do a full preview before Thursday's match and start a new thread, but from a UTR perspective, there's no reason why we can't win this. In that Tennis Recruiting roundtable discussion I posted here, one of the analysts picked Duke over North Carolina and Vanderbilt for the title and cited a 4-2 individual UTR advantage as the reason why.

Well, Stanford has that same advantage over North Carolina. Here's how it looks by each position:

1. Gordon by 0.22
2. Lord by 0.37
3. UNC by 0.04
4. UNC by 0.09
5. Shin by 0.25
6. Higuchi by 0.5

It could easily come down to the doubles point, where you might have to give a slight advantage to UNC. Rankings-wise, it should help for UNC to throw out the #2 team on Court 1 (vs. the #3 team) and the #33 team on Court 2 (vs. #84 Lampl/Yee). But that ignores how tough Lampl and Yee have been (a 15-2 dual match record), and I'm not picking anyone against Lord/Shin at #3 doubles (11-1 in dual matches) the rest of the way.

FYI, slam.tennis says Stanford has a 25% chance to win. I think that misreads it, but there's such a big spread in ITA rankings that it's tough to accurately predict this one. If you were just looking at ITA rankings, you might expect an even smaller upset chance for the #15 team playing the #1. If you're looking at USTA rankings, the idea of #6 beating #2 isn't so farfetched. But if you look at UTR, then it's Stanford, rather than UNC, that is a narrow favorite. Ultimately, we have to remember that all of these rankings systems depend in large part on the team's resume throughout the year, and UNC blows us out of the water there. But just because their 11-3 record against Top 25 teams (compared to our 3-3 record) is what contributes to that rankings boost doesn't mean that record is meaningless. They have played--and beaten--many, many more good teams this year than Stanford has, and that experience is valuable. Stanford's case is based on (1) the quality of its players, and (2) the quality of its coaching, especially in the NCAAs. And it's a good case! But it's hard to blame anyone who looks at all the numbers, considers that Winston-Salem is just an hour and 15 minutes from Chapel Hill, and thinks UNC will have an edge.

As for the other Round of 16 matches, slam.tennis mostly predicts close ones. #5 Ole Miss is only a 57% favorite over #12 UCLA, FSU is 55% to win over Tulsa, #13 Pepperdine is actually a 66% favorite over #4 Georgia Tech, #6 Texas is 68% to win over #11 Texas Tech, and #7 Georgia is 57% to win over #10 South Carolina. The only matches behind us in terms of anticipated closeness are #1 Vanderbilt being 92% likely to win over #16 Miami and #3 Duke being a 87% favorite over #14 Northwestern. (I don't know the exact makeup of the calculation that generates those percentages, but it factors in ITA ranking, USTA ranking, slam.tennis's own ranking (in which Stanford is 7th), and the UTR Power 6 (in which Stanford is 1st), at least.)

RE: Women's Tennis: NCAA First and Second Rounds - ColoradoTree - 05-14-2018

A quick comment on UTR. It's been around for several years, and it's been used in college tennis for at least a few years (as part of seeding fields in some tournaments, and it's factored into the preseason rankings, I believe). But it hasn't achieved the same notoriety as ITA rankings. And to be honest, this is the first year I've paid closer attention to UTRs (Universal Tennis Ratings) as part of the match analysis process, mainly thanks to Bobby Knight of College Tennis Today using them as part of his match previews (anyone can look up a player's UTR by signing up for free on the website, but to do so in an efficient and useful way requires a subscription, and I'm not gonna pay to write this stuff).  I thought it might prove useful to look at how predictive they are, and really, at what point a differential becomes meaningful in assessing how likely a player is to win a particular match.  Obviously, it'll never be that good, because at the end of it all, they're human beings, not robots, and if you're only slightly better than a player, you shouldn't expect to beat them all of the time, and this is still just one way of looking at a match and should not be used to the exclusion of others. UTR's early advocates said that a 1-point differential was usually the threshold for a competitive match, but if we start collecting more data over time, maybe we can start gleaning some insights into how likely or unlikely an upset is, given the disparity in UTR between two players. So, if you'll indulge me, here's how we did against Michigan vs. expectations.

1. Gordon had a 0.18 advantage over Fahey (the preseason #6 player in the country), so you'd expect a very close match, and that's what you got in the first set, with Fahey winning 7-5. But Fahey was leading 5-1 in the second.

2. Lord had a 0.37 advantage over Minor, and she steamrolled her, 6-1, 6-2. Certainly not what I'd expect given that difference.

3. Lampl had a 0.19 advantage, and was leading 7-6, 2-2 when the match was abandoned. That feels about right?

4. Arbuthnott had a 0.30 advantage, but had lost the first set 6-4 and was on serve 4-4 in the second. Seems a bit off, but if she pulls out the second and wins the third solidly, then that would be in line with expectations.

5. Shin had a big gap, 0.88, over Ruder-Hook, so a 6-4, 6-1 win seems right there.

6. Higuchi had a similarly big gap, 1.26, over Lorenzini, and destroyed her, 6-1, 6-0. The only match exceeding a 1-point differential, and it was the least competitive.

So far, the working hypothesis of "the bigger the UTR margin, the less competitive the match" seems fair, but that's not a very useful hypothesis, now is it? I'd love for the people behind UTR to start putting out numbers based on all the matches they have in their database to say, "when you have a .3 advantage, that means you're X% likely to win" or something similar. But alas, we do not yet have such a thing.