Second Junior Slam of 2006 Starts Sunday

Usta.com has a French Open juniors preview article as does the ITF junior site.

The junior draws were just released today and there is only one seed from the U.S. in boys--Donald Young, no. 2, and one in girls--Julia Cohen, no. 12. Kellen Damico, Jamie Hunt, Clint Bowles and Dennis Lajola are the other U.S. boys in the main draw. Lauren Albanese and Kim Couts are the only other U.S. girls playing on the clay at Roland Garros.

The seeding in the boys event was done entirely on ITF Junior rankings. Although I was surprised to learn that there is not a formal procedure for this at Grand Slams, generally any boy in the top 500 of the ATP rankings will be seeded. None of this year's entrants meets that criteria, so only the ITF junior rankings were used.

But on the girls side, things are much different. Generally, if a girl is in the top 300 of the WTA rankings she is seeded; but that's not always the case. Here are the girls' seeds, with current (May 29) top 300 rankings in parentheses.

1. Pavlyuchenkova
2. Radwanska (206)
3. Chan (182)
4. Bacsinszky (192)
5. Wozniacki
6. Morita
7. Kleybanova (221)
8. Olaru
9. Buzarnescu
10. Cornet (228)
11. Cirstea
12. Cohen
13. Fedossova (267)
14. Antoniychuk
15. Kucova (274)
16. Pereira

It appears the tournament committee decided to seed the top two according to ITF junior rankings and then intersperse the other top 300* players among the remaining seeds. But poor Tamira Paszek of Austria, a quarterfinalist in Australia this year and a member of Austria's Fed Cup team. She's ranked 277 by the WTA computers, but wasn't deemed seed-worthy, even though she could have easily bumped Pereira.
*top 275?

And another girl that must have been thisclose to being seeded was Dominika Cibulkova, the Eddie Herr champion, who is no. 302 in the WTA and 19 in the ITF. At the time of the acceptances, she was ranked seventh by the ITF, but when she didn't defend her Italian Open title, those points dropped off and her ranking fell.

So who does Cibulkova draw in the first round? The top seed, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the 14-year-old Russian phenom who won the Australian Open this year.

Now THAT's a first round match--last year's Italian Open champion against this year's Australian Open winner.