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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Seven Pre Qualifiers One Match from ITA Men's All-American Main Draw; Wichita Falls ITF Underway; Pro Circuit Update


On Wednesday, seven players who made their way through pre qualifying at the St. Francis Health System ITA All American Championships in Tulsa will have a chance to make the main draw with one more win.  Four of them, all freshmen, have won six matches in the past four days: AJ Catanzariti of Texas A&M, Logan Staggs of Northwestern, Robert Kelly of North Carolina and Aleks Vukic of Illinois.  The other three pre qualifiers were seeded in pre qualifying, so played "only" three matches Saturday and Sunday: Jack Murray of North Carolina, Jonathan Ho of Wake Forest and Tomas Stillman of Texas-San Antonio.

It's impossible to say for sure whether the no-ad format is responsible for all the upsets, or if it is simply an indication of the depth in the men's game, but of the 32 seeds who started in the qualifying draw of 128 only four remain, with highest being No. 10 Andreas Bjerrehus of Virginia Tech.

Complete results from today's singles matches can be found at the ITA tournament hub page.

The women's ITA Riviera All-American is playing two rounds of qualifying today, with the final round on Wednesday.  Michigan's Ronit Yurovsky, the top seed in qualifying, apparently moved into the main draw, with a lucky loser taking her spot at the top of the draw.

Results of the women's matches will eventually be posted on the ITA tournament hub page.

The ITF Grade 4 in Wichita Falls is being played this week, and so far the top seeds have made it through the first two rounds of play. 

Alexander Lebedev(1) and Emil Reinberg(2) have advanced in the boys draw, as has last week's winner in Waco, unseeded Ryan Storrie of Great Britain.

Gabby Pollner(1) and Miranda Ramirez(2) are through to the third round, but last week's Waco champion Kylie McKenzie retired in the second set, after winning the first, in her opening round match against No. 6 seed Alexa Bortles.

At the $100,000 Sacramento Challenger today, Jared Donaldson, Bjorn Fratangelo, Daniel Nguyen(USC), JP Smith(Tennessee), Marcos Giron(UCLA) and Elias Ymer of Sweden were among the first round winners. Top seeds Sam Querrey and Tim Smyczek also moved into the second round with victories today. 

Qualifying is complete at the $10,000 women's tournament in Hilton Head, with Jessica Failla, Erica Oosterhout, Amy Yang, Usue Arconada and Caroline Dolehide among those earning spots in the main draw.  Marie Norris, Rianna Valdes and wild card Sophie Chang won their opening matches in the main draw, as did US Open girls champion Marie Bouzkova of the Czech Republic.

2 comments:

?? said...

A better question than was no ad responsible for the seeding "upsets" would be: how did the ITA seed in the first place. Based on U.T.R. the seeds are not even close to correct.

fwiw said...

??

The ITA seeds the same way each year for Tulsa. They use the initial 14-15 rankings which are based on a player's results from the previous season, 13-14 in this case.

The ITA uses a players' year end computer ranking from the previous college season and removes all the players who graduated, turned pro, etc. The remaining list forms the initial rankings for a season.