Still months away (February 2018), but the women's tennis team will be heading to Pepperdine for the ITA Kick-Off Weekend.

They will open play as the 3-seed vs Oregon.
http://www.itatennis.com/Events/Kick-Off..._Draft.htm


Edit: Maryland will be the 4th team
1. #8 Pepperdine
2. #38 Oregon
3. #40 Rice
4. Maryland

Men's draft is June 8th.

(06-07-2017 12:37 PM)dragon2owl Wrote:  Still months away (February 2018), but the women's tennis team will be heading to Pepperdine for the ITA Kick-Off Weekend.

They will open play as the 3-seed vs Oregon.
http://www.itatennis.com/Events/Kick-Off..._Draft.htm


Edit: Maryland will be the 4th team
1. #8 Pepperdine
2. #38 Oregon
3. #40 Rice
4. Maryland

Men's draft is June 8th.

This is a pretty cool way to start a season: 60 upper-tier teams from all over the country are assigned to 15 four-team regionals. Each team plays two matches in the regional.

Many sports have these season-opening mini-tournaments, but my impression is that they are all separately managed and negotiated, so that getting invited is a matter of revenue potential, connections and so on. In tennis, all you need to do to get invited to this thing is to do well the previous season.

Not that it will ever happen, but it could be aa great model for basketball and baseball to follow. Heck, it could even be a great way to do out-of-conference scheduling for football.

Appears the men team passed on this? They are #44.
http://www.itatennis.com/Events/Kick-Off..._Draft.htm

(06-08-2017 03:40 PM)dragon2owl Wrote:  Appears the men team passed on this? They are #44.
http://www.itatennis.com/Events/Kick-Off..._Draft.htm

I would guess so. From what I can figure, we should have been able to qualify. I don't see anything limiting the number of teams a region can send, so we should have been in ahead of Tulsa, Drake, Iowa, or any of the other unranked teams. Participants supposed to all be in the top 75, but for some reason they haven't released the final rankings. Normally, the final rankings are out at the first of June, but they also haven't posted the Atlantic regional rankings. Maybe it's something to do with UVA winning the title? The ITA did release the Carolinas regional rankings, so I really can't tell what the hold up is.