Stephens, Domijan Lead Buzz to Third Win; Pro Circuit News; Vickery Feature
The World Team Tennis New York Buzz posted their third win Tuesday night, this one coming against the Boston Lobsters, who had 18-time Grand Slam singles champion Martina Navratilova playing for them. But her 10 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles didn't help against Alex Domijan and Sloane Stephens, who managed to beat Navratilova and James Aukland 5-0 to open the match. Stephens and Mallory Burdette also beat Navratilova and Raquel Kops-Jones in women's doubles, 5-3, and Stephens closed out a perfect evening with a 5-4 win over Boston's Stephanie Foretz in women's singles. Domijan and Ryan Lipman lost in men's doubles, and Domijan fell to Jan-Michael Gambill in men's singles, but in the overtime that decided the match, Domijan beat Gambill to give the amateur Buzz the victory.
Navratilova spoke about the junior team concept in this story, from the Albany Times-Union and about Stephens in particular in this article from the Schenectady Daily Gazette.
There's been consistently good coverage of this week's Aptos Challenger and the Peoria Futures, although none that I can find about the women's Pro Circuit event in Atlanta. The San Jose Mercury-News provided detailed coverage of Alex Bogomolov's upset of Arnaud Clement yesterday and of Wayne Odesnik's first round victory in this story. And the Peoria Journal Star spoke with Stanford sophomore Bradley Klahn about his first year in college and his first round win yesterday in this article.
Another interesting story from last week involves Caryn Copeland Wilson, who is only the second woman to play in both the tennis and golf U.S. Opens. As Caryn Copeland, she was a three-time All-american in tennis at Stanford and played the U.S. Open in the mid-80s. She is now a golfer, and at age 48, qualified for the U.S. Women's Open last week in Pennsylvania. She's in very good company--the other woman to play in both is Althea Gibson. For the complete story, from the New York Times, click here.
For those who might wonder what happened to 1989 Kalamazoo boys 16s champion David Witt, the Jacksonville Fla. Times-Union posted this "where are they now?" story recently.
And somehow I missed this story on Sachia Vickery from Michelle Kaufman of the Miami Herald that was published during the Wimbledon Junior championships.
6 comments:
Collette,
The David Witt link is going to the Caryn Wilson story.
Also, I dont understand this whole thing with juniors playing the WTT matches. Do the lower level pros just not want to? I'd rather go watch a pro than some junior I've never heard of.
Sachia Vickery has already turned pro? A tad early I believe...
@Austin--
Thanks for letting me know about the link. It's fixed now.
In Atlanta, after the first round of the main draw, 7 seeds remain.
Irina Falconi beat #5 Gail Brodsky in 3 sets. Brodsky had a stomach muscle or cramping issue at the end of the third. Four qualifiers made it through the first round including Lindsay Burdette, Caitlin Whoriskey, Lauren Davis and Alexandra Cerone.
Alison Riske beat future teammate Catherine Newman 2 & 2.
Lauren Davis is having a good week. In the 4 rounds to qualify she won 0 & 0; 1 & 0; 1 & 0 over Lauren Herring who played well; and 2 & 1 over Stephanie Hoffpauir future UCLA freshman. In 8 sets she only lost 5 games. In the first round today she beat #652 Maureen Diaz 4 & 0. She plays Jennifer Elie, the 7th seed tomorrow.
An interesting qualifier match was Caroline Price and Hilary Barte. Caroline was right with her for one set was even up a break very early but lost the first set 6 - 4.
Confidence and experience took over for an easy love set for Hilary in the 2nd.
most girls who do anything in tennis turn prob around 14 anyways. nearly every top ranked girl turned pro very early. the williams siters were both 14.
Austin:
[ur]http://www.asapsports.com/show_conference.php?id=56221[/url]
[quote]Q. The World TeamTennis season is coming up in July. USTA has the team of junior tennis for New York. Can you talk about how that idea came about, how you went about implementing it, talking to the Buzz, et cetera.
PATRICK McENROE: I'll tell you exactly what happened. Ilana Kloss, who runs World TeamTennis with Billie Jean King, came to me maybe four, five, six months ago. We met in her offices in New York. You know the USTA was right around that time doing a deal with World TeamTennis. The USTA is now tied in more directly and owns part of World TeamTennis. She said, We'd love to have player development be more of a part of World TeamTennis. I have a lot of history with it because I played it for many years, I loved it. I loved it so much that I became a part owner of a team in New York, which are now the New York SportTimes, which I have a minority ownership in now. So I'm not involved on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, that being said, my feeling, as I said to Ilana, the only way I can really see this working for me and our program is if we basically had our own team. If we had a team, I could justify taking one of our coaches and having them spend three and a half weeks as a coach of a team, then working with the four players, the two boys and the two girls.
Ilana was able to go back to her league, to World TeamTennis, and say to them, Here is the proposal, the idea that Patrick has. Because I wasn't interested in having sort of one player on this team, one player on that team. Then I just felt it really doesn't do our program a whole lot of good. Obviously, it's fine to take a young pro and put him on a World TeamTennis team. I think that's a good experience for a kid, as well. As far as for our own program, that was the way I felt we really could work well.
So she went back to her teams and she was able to get one of the teams, which just happened to be in Upstate New York, interested in that as an idea, something they could do. I had no idea which team it was going to be or which part of the country it would be. To me it was just if you could get one team, get four players and a coach, that would be a great situation for our young kids.
I'm happy to say that Ilana was able to do that and we were able to get some of our very, very top kids, both boys and girls, to be part of the team. I think it will be a great experience for them. I think it will be also fun for the fans up there to see our best juniors playing on a team together.[/quote]
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