[Lorcan]

It's about time to start a new thread - as there's some surprising - or perhaps not surprising news for the tennis team. Alexis Blokhina is on the roster, and making her return to collegiate tennis after a brief stint as a pro. That's monumental news as we look to build a team that can be a contender. Preseason rankings have dropped, and we have six players ranked:

#18 Valerie Glozman
#19 Monika Ekstrand
#29 Alyssa Ahn
#87 Alexis Blokhina
#119 Tianmei Wang
#123 Katerina Shabashkevich (#6 Freshman per TRN and a Blue Chip, #18 newcomer) 

In doubles, we have 

#21 Blokhina/Glozman
#81 Ahn/Wang

If we're able to be healthy this year, we should be able to surprise some teams with Sein Myoung and Kaia Giribalan providing some depth on top of our top 6 - a nice change from past seasons where we had Emma Sun or Morgan Shaffer to turn to if someone was injured.  

In looking at the rankings, there are definitely some stacked teams if people are healthy. 

Ohio State is absolutely loaded with a top four of #3 Luciana Perry, #4 Teah Chavez, #37 Sophia Cisse-Ignatiev, and #39 Nao Nishino and a fifth in the top 120. Duke has picked up two highly touted freshmen in Nina Vargova and Mimi Xu - and should be a tough out for any team. I'll be curious to see how things begin to shake out in the coming weeks as we learn more.

ITA All American Championships will kick off the season on September 19-27th - with multiple individual championships to follow this fall. We likely won't see the team play together likely until the winter for ITA Kickoff Weekend where we have elected to go to a tough regional with #16 Vanderbilt, #19 Tennessee, #28 Stanford, and #33 Arizona. That's almost as tough as the teams going to #13 USC with #17 ASU, #18 Florida, and #25 Clemson going there, and #15 UCLA getting #20 UCF, #21 TCU, and #22 Cal. By contrast - NOBODY wanted to go to #9 Pepperdine with their highest competition being #49 North Florida.

[Lorcan]

It's about time to start a new thread - as there's some surprising - or perhaps not surprising news for the tennis team. Alexis Blokhina is on the roster, and making her return to collegiate tennis after a brief stint as a pro. That's monumental news as we look to build a team that can be a contender. Preseason rankings have dropped, and we have six players ranked:

#18 Valerie Glozman
#19 Monika Ekstrand
#29 Alyssa Ahn
#87 Alexis Blokhina
#119 Tianmei Wang
#123 Katerina Shabashkevich (#6 Freshman per TRN and a Blue Chip, #18 newcomer) 

In doubles, we have 

#21 Blokhina/Glozman
#81 Ahn/Wang

If we're able to be healthy this year, we should be able to surprise some teams with Sein Myoung and Kaia Giribalan providing some depth on top of our top 6 - a nice change from past seasons where we had Emma Sun or Morgan Shaffer to turn to if someone was injured.  

In looking at the rankings, there are definitely some stacked teams if people are healthy. 

Ohio State is absolutely loaded with a top four of #3 Luciana Perry, #4 Teah Chavez, #37 Sophia Cisse-Ignatiev, and #39 Nao Nishino and a fifth in the top 120. Duke has picked up two highly touted freshmen in Nina Vargova and Mimi Xu - and should be a tough out for any team. I'll be curious to see how things begin to shake out in the coming weeks as we learn more.

ITA All American Championships will kick off the season on September 19-27th - with multiple individual championships to follow this fall. We likely won't see the team play together likely until the winter for ITA Kickoff Weekend where we have elected to go to a tough regional with #16 Vanderbilt, #19 Tennessee, #28 Stanford, and #33 Arizona. That's almost as tough as the teams going to #13 USC with #17 ASU, #18 Florida, and #25 Clemson going there, and #15 UCLA getting #20 UCF, #21 TCU, and #22 Cal. By contrast - NOBODY wanted to go to #9 Pepperdine with their highest competition being #49 North Florida.