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Sunday, October 4, 2009

Australia Wins Junior Davis Cup, Russia Takes Junior Fed Cup; Harrison Wins Second Futures Title; Pre-Qualifying Complete at All-American Tournaments


Third-seeded Australia has won the Junior Davis Cup title for the second time in three years, defeating Great Britain 2-1 in Sunday's final in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Australia's Bernard Tomic, Mark Verryth and Alex Sanders won the 2007 16-and-under ITF competition in Italy; this year it was Jason Kubler, Luke Saville and Joey Swaysland bringing Australia its fifth Junior Davis Cup championship. Kubler and Swaysland were on the Australian team that won the ITF 14-and-under World Junior Tennis Competition in 2007.

For the second consecutive day, Great Britain played without its No. 1, Oliver Golding. No. 3 Andrew Bettles beat Australia's No. 2 Saville, but No. 1 Kubler defeated Great Britain's No. 2 George Morgan to even it, then Swaysland and Kubler won the doubles in straight sets over Bettles and Morgan. For more on the Australian win, see this foxsports.com story.

The seventh-seeded U.S. team of Marcos Giron, Hunter Harrington and Bjorn Fratangelo finished fifth, defeating unseeded Korea 2-0 to go 4-1 in the competition.

The top-seeded Russian girls claimed their second title, needing only two singles matches to defeat fourth-seeded Germany. Germany again did not use No. 1 player Anna-Lena Friedsam, and although semifinal heroine Stephanie Wagner, at No. 3, put up a battle against Russia's No. 2 Ksenia Kirillova, she lost 8-6 in the third. Russian No. 1 Daria Gavrilova then defeated No. 2 Annika Beck 6-0, 6-3 to assure the victory, Russia's first since 1997.

The ITF junior website has photos, results and a story, although no mention of why the finalists did not have their top players on the court on the weekend.


Seventeen-year-old Ryan Harrison won the $10,000 Pro Circuit Futures tournament in Laguna Niguel today, coming back to defeat No. 5 seed Richard Bloomfield of Great Britain 4-6, 6-3, 7-5. It is the second Pro Circuit title of his career, both coming this summer, and he was a finalist last week. Harrison and partner Michael Venus, the fourth seeds, won the doubles title, defeating unseeded Denis Kudla and Raymond Sarmiento 6-2, 6-4. For the second straight week, the doubles champions won all four of their matches without needing a match tiebreaker.

Harrison has a wild card into the main draw of the $50,000 Sacramento challenger next week. Later this month, he will join Yuki Bhambri, also an IMG client, at an exhibition in Macau featuring Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. Bhambri won his fifth Futures title this past week, but has decided not to play this week's event in Pune, India due to fatigue and injury, according to this story from the Pune Mirror.

For results of the Pro Circuit events, including qualifying for this week's Sacramento challenger and two women's tournaments, see the Pro Circuit results page.

The women's Riviera All-American pre-qualifying is complete, and there were plenty of surprises. Of the 14 seeds (the No. 5 & 6 seeds were elevated to qualifying) only two made it out of pre-qualifying, both of them 9-16 seeds: Kristina Nedeltcheva of UNLV and Nina Secerbegovic of Baylor. The unseeded players taking a berth in the 64-draw qualifying are: Zara Harutyunyan of Akron, Danielle Lao of Southern Cal, Stephanie Hammel of UC-Irvine, Lutflana Budiharto of Wichita State, Kayla Duncan of TCU and Aeriel Ellis of Texas.

The women's qualifying begins on Tuesday. See the tournament page for that draw and Sunday's singles and doubles results.

For the men in Tulsa, there are 16 qualifiers for the 128 qualifying draw, so I won't name them all. Ole Miss put four players through to Monday's qualifying, Mississippi State had two, and the other ten were from ten different schools. For complete results from the pre-qualifying, see the ITA tournament home page.

2 comments:

5.0 Player said...

Colette or anyone else, hopefully you can answer this question.

Perhaps this was already covered in an earlier post but can anyone please explain how the USA Boys Junior Davis Cup Team was picked this time? Hunter Harrington is obviously a good player but once Shane Vinsant pulled out due to injuries why didn't they consider higher ranked players? For example, what about Jeremy Efferding, Daniel McCall, Dennis Novikov and Emmett Egger just to name a few?

Observer said...

Yea i have the same question if you someone could answer that.