Sign Up to Receive Daily Zootennis.com Emails; Wimbledon Wild Cards; Women's ITA Kickoff Weekend Draft Complete

Back in April, Google announced that its Feedburner service would no longer provide an emailing service, which many Zootennis.com readers have used to over the past 15 years to access the daily content I provide. With a deadline of July 1, I have been working on the transition to Mailchimp, a popular email and marketing service that will automatically send these emails every morning, and have been testing it for the past few weeks. 

The good news is that the handful of emails that have been going out each day via Mailchimp (if you have signed up in the past month, that's what you are getting) have been sent reliably at 6 am each day, which has definitely not been the case lately under the Feedburner system.

The bad news is that Mailchimp has told me that I can't just import all the Feedburner email addresses; there are too many inactive emails that Feedburner has not removed, making the bounce rate too high.

What that means is that if you want to be sure to get the daily email, you need to sign up again, via the box on the left. This will ensure that you are in the Mailchimp system.

You will get both emails temporarily, as I give readers an opportunity to sign up in the next few weeks. I am also working on sending an email to everyone on the Feedburner list to let them know they should be signing up if they want to continue to get emails after Feedburner shuts down in a few weeks.

I know many people access this site from bookmarks, RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook and none of those methods should be affected by this. But the email option remains popular, so I do want to continue to offer that service. I do not provide your email to anyone else, period. Those who have been getting the daily emails can vouch for that.

I will post this same announcement the next two Wednesdays, so I apologize in advance if you get tired of hearing about it, but once July arrives the transition should be complete.

Wimbledon announced its first wild cards today, with a few yet to be determined.

The women's main draw wild cards:

Katie Boulter (GBR)
Jodie Burrage (GBR)
Harriet Dart (GBR)
Francesca Jones (GBR)
Samantha Murray Sharan (GBR)
Venus Williams (USA)
To be announced
To be announced

The men's main draw wild cards:

Carlos Alcaraz (ESP)
Liam Broady (GBR)
Jay Clarke (GBR)
Jack Draper (GBR)
Andy Murray (GBR)
To be announced
To be announced
To be announced

The qualifying wild cards include 2019 Wimbledon boys champion Shintaro Mochizuki of Japan, as well as Stanford freshman Arthur Fery, former Memphis star Ryan Peniston and current ITF Junior No. 11 Jack Pinnington Jones. 2019 girls champion Daria Snigur of Ukraine is in the qualifying draw on her own ranking. Matilda Mutavdzic, currently No. 20 in the ITF junior rankings, is the only junior to receive a quailfying wild card.

Men's qualifying wild cards:
Arthur Fery (GBR)
Felix Gill (GBR)
William Jansen (GBR)
Anton Matusevich (GBR)
Aidan McHugh (GBR)
Shintaro Mochizuki (JPN)
Stuart Parker (GBR)
Ryan Peniston (GBR)
Jack Pinnington Jones (GBR)

Women's qualifying wild cards:

Naiktha Bains (GBR)
Tara Moore (GBR)
Matilda Mutavdzik (GBR)
Emma Raducanu (GBR)
Eva Shaw (GBR)
Eden Silva (GBR)
Katie Swan (GBR)
Not used - Next direct acceptance
Not used - Next direct acceptance

For the doubles wild cards, several of which have also yet to be determined, see this article from Wimbledon.com.

The Women's ITA Kickoff Weekend draft is complete, with 45 teams selecting from the 15 the host sites to visit in order to earn a place in next February's ITA Team Indoor Championships. The Top 15 teams in the 2021 final rankings will host three teams, who choose where they want to go based on both geography and on which regional may give them the best chance to beat the host and earn a place in the 16-team draw. Wisconsin is host to the Women's Team Indoor Championships in 2022, so they automatically qualify as one of the 16 teams.

The first regional site to fill up was No. 10 Georgia Tech, which will host No. 16 Michigan, No. 28 Mississippi and No. 30 Old Dominion. Also filling up early were the regionals hosted by No. 6 North Carolina State and No. 12 Ohio State.  No. 2 Pepperdine and No. 4 UCLA were the last to fill. Two teams, Syracuse and Louisville, passed. No. 62 Cal Poly was the last team to get in, of the teams that participated in the draft.

For the women's bracket, see this update from SLAM tennis.

The men's draft is Thursday at noon EDT; follow along at SLAM tennis.