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US Open National Playoff Underway, Sonia Hahn To UTRGV, More Schedules Released, PlaySight adding more schools

by | Aug 20, 2016 | Blog

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The US Open National Playoff got underway today in New Haven with three of the four men’s seeds and two of the four women’s seeds advancing to the quarterfinals. The men’s third seed Eric Quigley (Kentucky ’12) was knocked off by UCLA senior Gage Brymer in two tiebreak sets while both the second and fourth seeds, Evan King and Jose Statham, came back from a set down to win in three sets. The top seed Nick Meister (UCLA ’12) won the most lopsided match of the day 6-1, 6-1 over Philip Major.

The women’s top seed Ayaka Okuno, who spent a semester at Georgia in 2013, was knocked off in straight sets by Sophie Chang while the fourth seed Ashley Weinhold lost in three-sets to North Carolina freshman Sara Daavettila. There was a Universal Tennis Rating upset as Eva Raszkiewicz rolled over Fernanda Contreras 6-3, 6-1 – Raszkiewicz’s UTR was 1.52 lower but that didn’t seem to bother her at all. All the results are listed in the table down below (two tabs) along with the quarterfinal matchups.

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) announced the hiring of Sonia Hahn as the Vaqueros’ new women’s head coach. Hahn comes to Edinburg after spending the last 19 years as the co-head coach at Tennessee where she compiled a 314-203 record (.607). Hahn replaces Stephanie Wooten-Quijada who left after one year to take the head coaching job at New Mexico.

Denver women’s head coach Christian Thompson signed a five-year extension that will run through 2022. Thompson is 50-18 in her three years at DU so the extension seems to be well deserved.

New Auburn head coach Bobby Reynolds was interviewed on AuburnTigers.com and in the interview he talks about still going toe-to-toe with the guys on the court. Reynolds also mentions the importance of pulling in recruits from his hometown of Atlanta which has been been a fertile recruiting area for years.

Colette Lewis has her Kalamazoo Boys 18 recap up on the Tennis Recruiting Network. She has plenty of quotes from the singles final participants (Michael Mmoh/Vasil Kirkov) and doubles champions (John McNally/JJ Wolf) with both of the latter committed to Ohio State.

I’m starting to see more and more schools releasing their schedules for the upcoming season – today I noticed both Florida and Oklahoma State released their men’s schedule. Florida is hosting this year’s SEC/Pac-12 Challenge on February 4th and 5th with Florida and Georgia set to play USC and UCLA. The Gators play at Virginia the week before the National Team Indoors (which Virginia is hosting again) and they welcome in Ohio State just before conference play begins.

Oklahoma State, which gave Virginia a great match in last year’s NCAA Round of 16, has a pretty loaded schedule this season. The Cowboys out of conference schedule includes Arkansas, Columbia, Kentucky/Tulsa, Wake Forest, NC State, Alabama, Wichita State, Northwestern, Michigan, Memphis, San Diego State, and SMU plus a few others.

I was excited to see this tweet from Playsight announcing that they’ll be providing live streaming on all 16 courts (12 outdoors/4 indoors) at the University of Georgia for the upcoming season(s). Georgia is hosting this year’s NCAA tournament, and as many know it always seems to rain in Athens during the NCAAs, so for the first time we’ll be able to watch streaming video from inside the 4-court indoor center. PlaySight also announced it’ll be installing SmartCourts and LiveCourts at Mississippi State so that means fans will be able to follow PlaySight’s HD feed at these SEC schools next season: Auburn, Georgia, Mississippi, Mississippi State, and Tennessee.