11-01-2021, 11:58 AM
The ITA National Fall Championships start this Thursday and go through Sunday at the Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego. By making the singles finals at Northwest Regionals, Connie Ma and Alexandra Yepifanova earned their spots in that draw, and by winning the doubles tournament with Ma, Angelica Blake will join them in San Diego. And now, apparently the ITA has changed the qualification criteria for Fall Nationals on the fly, further scrapping at-large selections for doubles and just mirroring the singles approach of having the finalists from each region make it to Fall Nationals. That means Niluka Madurawe will make the trip as well and Yepifanova will compete in both singles and doubles. I'd love to see Blake play some added singles matches, but she'd need several more players to drop out to make the draw. It's a loaded field, and it'll be a great opportunity to see where Ma and Yepifanova stack up against some of the best in the country. Hopefully they can at least notch a few wins that will serve them well in the singles rankings--these sorts of tournaments are absolutely massive in getting some quality results that keep your ranking high enough to get into the NCAA singles tournament in the spring.
This will be opposite a Stanford-hosted invitational this weekend where we'll see Choy, Geller, Houghton, Xu, and perhaps Gordon or Mossmer. We don't yet know all the schools participating, but hopefully it's a good enough field to keep that group of players challenged and developing.
No draws yet for either tournament, but at Fall Nationals, a handful of withdrawals has been good news for California-based players. In addition to the two ITA Wild Cards going to UCLA's Abbey Forbes and USC's Salma Ewing, the two alternates who have made the singles main draw now are Mariia Kozyreva from St. Mary's and freshman Snow Han from USC. (Unclear why Han was picked over some others, but she had an unquestionably good regional tournament, beating the 9th and 44th-ranked players in the country as well as the #2 newcomer in ASU's Patricija Spaka before losing to Pepperdine's Lisa Zaar, the ultimate regional winner, in the semis, so presumably an unofficial "live" ITA ranking combined with UTR has her fairly high.) The Han-Ewing doubles pairing also got a wild card, and Cal's Alsola-Richardson pair was selected as an at-large pick. Alsola started out as the 4th alternate in singles and is now up to 2nd. That influx of Pac-12 talent should be useful for those players' rankings, and potentially in turn for Stanford's players when we play them here and in the regular season. Better for us that those spots stay in the Pac-12 rather than continue to boost the SEC and ACC.
Overall, the singles draw has a number of schools with multiple players: USC and North Carolina with 3, and Stanford, UVA, Princeton, and Tennessee each with 2. Schools with two doubles teams in the draw are Stanford, UNC, Iowa State, UVA, and Colorado State (which is a surprise, but then again, the Mountain is the weakest ITA region).
The tournament website for Fall Nationals is here: https://colleges.wearecollegetennis.com/...FE691DD86E
Should be live scoring and streaming links before play kicks off on Thursday. As for the Stanford invitational, you can watch it at the usual link: http://streamingtennis.com/Cardinal/?DB_OEM_ID=30600
This will be opposite a Stanford-hosted invitational this weekend where we'll see Choy, Geller, Houghton, Xu, and perhaps Gordon or Mossmer. We don't yet know all the schools participating, but hopefully it's a good enough field to keep that group of players challenged and developing.
No draws yet for either tournament, but at Fall Nationals, a handful of withdrawals has been good news for California-based players. In addition to the two ITA Wild Cards going to UCLA's Abbey Forbes and USC's Salma Ewing, the two alternates who have made the singles main draw now are Mariia Kozyreva from St. Mary's and freshman Snow Han from USC. (Unclear why Han was picked over some others, but she had an unquestionably good regional tournament, beating the 9th and 44th-ranked players in the country as well as the #2 newcomer in ASU's Patricija Spaka before losing to Pepperdine's Lisa Zaar, the ultimate regional winner, in the semis, so presumably an unofficial "live" ITA ranking combined with UTR has her fairly high.) The Han-Ewing doubles pairing also got a wild card, and Cal's Alsola-Richardson pair was selected as an at-large pick. Alsola started out as the 4th alternate in singles and is now up to 2nd. That influx of Pac-12 talent should be useful for those players' rankings, and potentially in turn for Stanford's players when we play them here and in the regular season. Better for us that those spots stay in the Pac-12 rather than continue to boost the SEC and ACC.
Overall, the singles draw has a number of schools with multiple players: USC and North Carolina with 3, and Stanford, UVA, Princeton, and Tennessee each with 2. Schools with two doubles teams in the draw are Stanford, UNC, Iowa State, UVA, and Colorado State (which is a surprise, but then again, the Mountain is the weakest ITA region).
The tournament website for Fall Nationals is here: https://colleges.wearecollegetennis.com/...FE691DD86E
Should be live scoring and streaming links before play kicks off on Thursday. As for the Stanford invitational, you can watch it at the usual link: http://streamingtennis.com/Cardinal/?DB_OEM_ID=30600