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Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Year-end No. 1s in USTA Rankings; Review of Winter National 12s & 14s at TR.net; Women's Qualifying Scheduled to Begin in Melbourne

Last week the USTA published the final rankings for 2010, and I've put together a slideshow of the eight players that finished as No. 1 for the year.

For the complete rankings, click on the age division: B18s, G18s, B16s, G16s, B14s, G14s, B12s, G12s.



Three of the eight won the Winter Nationals, the final competition of 2010: Sofia Kenin, William Blumberg and Jamie Loeb. Ali Jones has more on the 12s and 14s USTA Winter National Championships in Tucson in this article for Tennis Recruiting Network.

The rainy weather in Melbourne is keeping the women's qualifying from beginning at the Australian Open. Among the 96 women competing for 12 main draw spots are seven Americans: top qualifying seed CoCo Vandeweghe, Irina Falconi, Lauren Albanese, Jamie Hampton, Madison Brengle, Julia Cohen and Sloane Stephens. Alison Riske received direct entry, and was the last player to do so before qualifying began.

Seven Australian women were given qualifying wild cards, 14-year-old Ashleigh Barty not among them (I believe she can accept such a wild card at her age, but I'm not entirely certain.) But the eighth wild card went to 15-year-old Russian Irina Khromacheva, a selection I just can't figure out.

The U.S. men had a good opening round, or at least much better than the Australians, who had only two of their 12 advance to the second round. Two Americans, Michael Yani and Alex Bogomolov had their first round matches suspended, but Ryan Sweeting, Alex Kuznetsov, Bobby Reynolds, Tim Smyczek, Kevin Kim and Donald Young are through to the second round. Rajeev Ram, Ryler DeHeart and alternate Michael McClune lost in the opening round.

The draws can be found at the tournament website, and the live stream they are providing of Court 3 is of high quality.

1 comments:

Brent said...

Great to see Christian Harrison back in the mix and playing great after his injury troubles and long layoff. He is into the second round of the Futures after working through qualifying. Hopefully he can keep it going. It is going to be fun watching these Harrison brothers over the next few years.