Top Seeds Advance at ITA Fall Nationals; 18-yo Qualifiers Subhash, Parks Advance at Las Vegas $60K; Six Current Collegians Receive Wild Cards into Oracle Challenger Series in Houston

The first round of singles is complete at the Oracle ITA National Fall Championships in Newport Beach California, with very few upsets. (I'm happy to see seedings numerically from 1-16 instead of the 5-8, 9-16 method that is so popular in college tennis). The trio of top-seeded UCLA women advanced, with Forbes winning 0 & 0, Hart 1 & 1 and Bolton 2 & 2. Top men's seeds Ito, Smith and McNally won, with only McNally needing three sets.  Only three seeds lost in total, all in the 9-16 range, as noted below.

It's always exciting for the non-Division I players to get a win, with ITA Cup champions Elyse Lavender(NAIA) of Brenau and Justine Leong(D-III) of Claremont-Mudd-Scripps advancing to the women's second round and Gabriel Ortiz of Seward County Community College(JUCO) advancing to the men's second round.

Live scoring is available via TennisTicker, with first round doubles matches continuing this evening.

Men:
1. Yuya Ito, Texas
2. Keegan Smith, UCLA
3. John McNally, Ohio State
4. Daniel Cukierman, USC
5. Adam Walton, Tennessee
6. Hady Habib, Texas A&M
7. Matias Soto, Baylor
8. Jack Lin, Columbia
9. Ondrej Styler, Michigan (out 1st rd)
10. Daniel Rodrigues, South Carolina
11. Christian Sigsgaard, Texas
12. Matej Vocel, Oklahoma State
13. Joseph Guillin, UC-Santa Barbara
14. Cannon Kingsley, Ohio State
15. Kyle Seelig, Ohio State (out 1st rd)
16. Zeke Clark, Illinois

Women:
1. Elysia Bolton, UCLA
2. Abigail Forbes, UCLA
3. Jada Hart, UCLA
4. Alexa Graham, North Carolina
5. Estela Perez-Somarriba, Miami
6. Anna Turati, Texas
7. Shiori Fukuda, Ohio State
8. Sara Daavettila, North Carolina
9. McCartney Kessler, Florida (out 1st rd)
10. Georgia Drummy, Vanderbilt
11. Kelly Chen, Duke
12. Cameron Morra, North Carolina
13. Adriana Reami, North Carolina State
14. Michaela Gordon, Stanford
15. Mia Horvit, South Carolina
16. Bunyawi Thamchaiwat, Oklahoma State

Virginia freshman Natasha Subhash  was scheduled to compete at the Fall Nationals this week but qualified for the $60,000 tournament in Las Vegas yesterday and withdrew from the collegiate event to continue on in the main draw. Today she picked up her second win at the $60K level, beating Johanna Larson of Sweden, a former WTA Top 50 player, 6-3, 6-2.  Another 18-year-old qualifier, Alycia Parks, earned the best win of her young career, beating WTA No. 95 and top seed Kirsten Flipkens of Belgium 6-4, 3-6, 7-5. With Flipkens' loss and the retirement yesterday of No. 2 seed Patricia Tig of Romania, No. 3 seed Katarina Zavatska of Ukraine is the highest seed remaining. Zavatska advanced when wild card Katerina Stewart retired leading 3-2 in the first set.

Next week is the Oracle Challenger Series event at Rice University in Houston, which consists of a WTA 125 tournament and an ATP Challenger 125. The wild card list was published today, with a total of six currently collegians awarded main draw spots. Former collegian Danielle Collins(Virginia), currently 31 in the WTA rankings, is competing for the first time since announcing she has been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and has accepted a wild card. Coco Vandeweghe and Bethanie Mattek-Sands also received main draw wild cards, as did Katarina Jokic, the Georgia junior from Serbia. Jokic earned an Oracle wild card for winning last year's Fall Nationals. Rice's Linda Huang also was given a main draw wild card.  Cici Bellis, finally back after over 18 months out for injury, received a qualifying wild card, as did Jamie Loeb.

Seventeen-year-old Zane Khan received a main draw wild card, as did Florida's Oliver Crawford, UCLA's Govind Nanda, USC's Brandon Holt and Rice's Sumit Sarkar.

For the wild card announcement, go to the Challenger Series website.