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Sunday, December 26, 2021

Seeds and Draws for USTA Winter Nationals 16s and 18s; Orange Bowl Photo Gallery; Four-time NCAA Champion Chong Wins $15K in Tunisia

The draws have been posted for the USTA's 18s and 16s Winter Nationals in Lake Nona, which begin on Tuesday. The 12s and 14s draws are not yet posted, but should be available tomorrow.


Below are the Top 16 seeds in each of the four draws for the event at the USTA National Campus.

USTA Winter Nationals
Top 16 seeds:

B16s:
1. Ari Cotoulas
2. Mitchell Lee
3. Callum Markowitz
4. Andrew Ena
5. Aaron Sandler
6. Kaveh Taheri
7. Declan Galligan
8. Noah McDonald
9. Rahul Sachdev
10. Ian Bracks
11. William Hsieh
12. Jordan Reznik
13. Carter Pate
14. Krish Arora
15. Vincent Yang
16. Kane Kelley

B18s:
1. Alexander Visser
2. Bjorn Swenson
3. Masato Perera
4. Nicholas Heng
5. Dean Kamenev
6. Kian Vakili
7. Vignesh Gogineni
8. Chad Miller
9. Landon Ardila
10. Marko Mesarovic
11. Rohan Sachdev
12. Jason Shuler
13. Grant Lothringer
14. Emon Van Loben Sels
15. Jelani Sarr
16. Ryan Torres

G16s:
1. Saray Yli-Piipari
2. Jessica Bernales
3. Ariel Madatali
4. Natasha Rajaram
5. Olivia Center
6. Elena Daskalova
7. Clara Zou
8. Maren Urata
9. Kate Fakih
10. withdrew
11. Emily Deming
12. Andrea De Los Rios Martinez
13. Pearlie Zhang
14. Madeleine Rexroat
15. Sophia Webster
16. Trinetra Vijayakumar

G18s:
1. Akari Matsuno
2. Ariana Pursoo
3. Ahmani Guichard
4. Charlotte Owensby
5. Alice Xu
6. Ann Guerry
7. Katie Codd
8. (withdrew)
9. Jo-Yee Chan
10. Gayathri Krishnan
11. Reese Miller
12. Sophia Wang
13. Bayley Sheinin
14. Emma Charney
15. Audrey Spencer
16. Kinaa Graham

Iva Jovic, the Junior Orange Bowl 14s champion, was planning to play the Winter National 16s, but is not in the draw, so she must have decided another trip to Florida less than a week after she went home to California wasn't necessary after all. Junior Orange Bowl 14s finalist Shannon Lam is entered in the 18s division.

A couple of notable unseeded boys in the 18s: Orange Bowl 16s champion Quang Duong, and Aidan Kim, who is coming off an injury, but is No. 84 in the ITF junior rankings now.

Bill Kallenberg was in Plantation for the Orange Bowl earlier this month for the Tennis Recruiting Network and today they published his photo gallery from the tournament.

Eudice Chong won her second of four NCAA singles titles
at the 2016 Division III NCAA Championships in Kalamazoo
There are only a few ITF World Tennis Tour events this week, and while I haven't been able to follow those results closely for several weeks now, I did want to mention the title won today by four-time NCAA Division III singles champion Eudice Chong at the $15K in Tunisia. Chong, who won her first title as a Wesleyan freshman in 2015 and defended it through her senior year in 2018, is from Hong Kong, where the pandemic was treated very seriously. The resulting inability to travel kept her from competing from March of last year to October of this year, but she has quickly regained her form, going 17-9 this year in $15 and $25Ks. Today's final, Chong, the No. 2 seed, defeated 16-year-old Sofia Costoulas of Belgium, currently No. 20 in the ITF junior rankings, 3-6, 6-4, 7-6(5) in a three-hour battle.

It's the third career ITF World Tennis Tour women's singles title for Chong and her first since 2018. She has 15 doubles titles on the WTT circuit, five of which have come this year. 

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