by Bobby Knight | Jan 30, 2016 | Blog
Typically during the regular season we don’t see a ton of great matches on Saturday but today we get 3 with 2 of them taking place at UCLA and the other at North Carolina. What’s kind of interesting is that all 6 of these teams played each other on the same day 364 days ago. Last year North Carolina went to Illinois and USC and UCLA went to Athens to play Georgia and Florida. I’d consider almost all 3 of these matches as toss-ups with a lot depending on who plays and where they play.It’s always easier to make predictions on these matches when I know the lineups in advance like I do for the Kick-Off Weekend, National Indoors, and NCAAs....
by Bobby Knight | Jan 24, 2016 | Blog
The 2016 ITA Kick-Off Weekend kicked into overdrive today with action taking place at 13 different sites across the country. There was supposed to be tennis at all 15 regional sites but due to the winter weather hammering the East Coast play at Columbia and Wake Forest was pushed back a day so those 2 regionals will play Sunday and Monday.While most of the matches were routine 4-0 or 4-1 wins there were a few barn burners with the most drama taking place in Los Angeles between USC and Tulane and in Columbus (OH) between Denver and South Carolina.We’ll start off in LA for the second round match between the host and #1 seed USC and the #3 seed Tulane. The...
by Bobby Knight | Jan 23, 2016 | Blog
There were just 4 matches on the Friday’s schedule and none of them were particularly close with USC, Tulane, Illinois, and Northwestern each rolling into the second round.Tulane started off the day by really taking it to Pepperdine with the Green Wave cruising to the doubles point and then getting runaway singles wins from Dominik Koepfer, Sebastian Rey, and Chi-Shan Jao at 1, 4, and 6. USC sat its #1 Max DeVroome and still rolled to a 7-0 win over UC Davis in a match where all courts were played to conclusion which is something that I like to see. The only Trojan to drop a set was newcomer Laurens Verboven who dropped his opening set before...
by Bobby Knight | Jan 22, 2016 | Blog
There will be 15 men’s regionals taking place this weekend with 2 of the 15 getting started on Friday. I’ll start off by previewing the USC and Illinois Regionals since they both start on Friday and I’ll work my through all 15 of them by Friday evening. Keep checking back for updates since I’ll just be adding on to this post. FYI, the numbers beside the school name are each player’s current Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) as of 1/20/16. USC Regional (Fri/Sat) – Marks Stadium (no live scoring due to construction)#57 UC Davis [4] at #8 USC [1] 4pm est/1pm pst USC Twitter – This will be the dual-match...
by Bobby Knight | Dec 24, 2015 | Blog
During USC’s stretch of dominance, which saw them win 4 National Titles in 5 years, one of the biggest things that contributed to USC’s success (aside from Steve Johnson) was the lack of turnover among its starters. The last time USC had to replace more than 2 starters was all the back in 2008 (Van’t Hof, Sacks, Piotrowski) but this season they have to replace 4 with Yannick Hanfmann, Roberto Quiroz, Eric Johnson, and Jonny Wang all moving on after 4 spectacular seasons.Hanfmann, Quiroz, Johnson, and Wang accounted for 59% of USC’s dual-match singles wins last season though the 2 returning starters, Max de Vroome (Sr) and Nick Crystal...
Latest Comments