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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Giron, Fratangelo & Duval Reach Third Round at French Juniors; Goodwin, Lim Take D-III Titles; USC, Florida Finish No. 1

It's a travel day for me, and although I have an NCAA notebook post planned, with brief pieces of information and my observations from the 12 days that didn't fit into my daily recaps, it will be after I've gotten some sleep and can think clearly.

At the French Open juniors, three US players have reached the round of 16 in singles--Marcos Giron, Bjorn Fratangelo and Vicky Duval. The top seven girls seeds have advanced to the third round, including No. 5 Monica Puig of Puerto Rico, but the boys draw has already lost top seed and Australian Open boys champion Jiri Vesely and second seed Hugo Dellien of Bolivia. There two French wild cards remaining, one of whom, Laurent Lokoli, is the reigning Orange Bowl 16s champion. Two qualifiers are also still in contention Miki Jankovic of Serbia, who has reached the quarterfinals, and Oriol Roca Batalla of Spain. Neither Giron nor Fratangelo faced a seed in the first two rounds, but will on Wednesday. Giron meets No. 4 seed Oliver Golding of Great Britain in a battle of two brillant forehands, while Fratangelo plays No. 11 seed Joris De Loore of Belgium, who reached the semifinals of both the Eddie Herr and Orange Bowl last year.

Duval will also play a seed on Wednesday when she takes on No. 4 Natalija Kostic of Serbia. Duvalis playing doubles with Australian Ashleigh Barty, and they won their opening match. Two US boys doubles teams are still alive, with Mitchell Krueger and Shane Vinsant into the quarterfinals, where they'll face top seeds Golding and Vesely. Fratangelo and Alexios Halebian also won their first round match.

The schedule and draws can be found at rolandgarros.com. The ITF junior website also is posting daily articles from Paris. Belgium's An-Sophie Mestach, who is actually No. 1 in the world (Russian Daria Gavrilova finished 2010 as world junior champion), was injured in the Grade 1 in Belgium last week and withdrew.

While Division I was in Northern California, the NCAA Division III individual championships were going on in Southern California, at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps and Pomona-Pitzer. CMS claimed a national title, with sophomore Kristin Lim defeating Kendra Higgins of the University of Chicago 6-1, 6-3 for the women's singles. Emory was assured a national champion when teammates Michael Goodwin and Dillon Pottish met in the final. It was Goodwin who took the title, joining his older brother Michael, who won the championship while at Emory in 2009. Goodwin, the fourth seed, beat Pottish, the top seed, 6-2, 7-6(3).

The final team rankings are out, and unsurprisingly, National Champions Florida and USC are at the top, marking the end of a controversial four months. Or is it? Grant Chen, Director of Tennis Operations at UCLA, tweeted today that the top 2 women's programs, which are Florida and Stanford of course, are not participating in next week's ITA kickoff weekend draft for the 2012 Indoor Team Championships. Stanford and Florida have frequently skipped the event, so it's difficult to say whether this is the result of this year's ranking mess or unrelated.

For the complete and final team rankings, see the ITA website.

9 comments:

Austin said...

In 2009 Florida men had the following players in their lineup who played for a different school this season: Carlos Cueto(Cal), Joey Burkhardt(UNC), Jeff Dadamo(Texas A&M and doubles national champion), Johnny Hamui(Illinois).

Don't forget that Tyler Hochwalt was a freshman on the '08 team before leaving school. He would have been a senior.

Add Alex Lacroix, Sekou Bangoura and Bob Van Overbeek to that and, wow, what a lineup! National champions, right? Two of those guys would be coming off the bench, that's crazy.

Erik Corace would also have been a senior this season. I have no clue what happened to him.

scott said...

Stanford and Florida are going back to facing each other again during the regular season next year. Could be they don't wan there to be the potential for 3 meetings in the year, if they were to meet at indoors and outdoors. Who knows. Florida also always schedules the likes of UNC, Duke, Baylor, plus they face UGA in conference. They don't really need indoors to beef up the schedule. Likewise with Stanford in the usually solid Pac 10.

UCLA fan said...

Scooter said...

Scott - Outside the PAC-10 and outside the national indoor this year the best win for Stanford was against Oklahoma. Eliminate the national indoor and Stanford would never have reached #1 in the rankings. I suspect they feel they might not win so why play?

Ucla fan said...

Collette,

Did you know skylar Morton committed to ucla??

Melancholy said...

Austin...was thinking the same thing about the Florida class of 2007 -2009 as I'm sure the coaching staff had many a sleepless night at the thought of what might have been. Erik Corace remained at UF and should have wrapped up this year and left the team after the departure of Dadamo, Hochwalt, and Hamui.

I'm thinking that losing a total of 6 players inside of 2 semesters left some spending money for the program allowing Bangoura and Van Overbeek to come in.

Perhaps winning the SEC this year softened the loss of these guys but we all know its about The Big Dance and that team would have been great to watch this year!

5.0 Player said...

Would someone please fill us in on the great mystery of why so many top players leave the Florida program? I've been wondering about this for years. Theories anyone?

work-hard-tennis said...

I have wondered the same thing. Yet you can't get an answer out of anyone. It is "hidden". What is the deal?

TennisSC said...

Congratulations to Chris Goodwin, excellent job winning the D-lll title.
Good luck in your senior year.