ITA Women: UCLA Stunned, Ohio State Claims 1st NTI Berth

14 of the 15 ITA Kickoff Regionals saw play today, with Cal struggling with rain for the second consecutive day. Five Regionals were completed with 3 No.1 seeds, a No.2 seed and a surprise No.3 seed claiming final victories to join Wisconsin at the ITA National Team Indoor, being held February 5-8 in Madison, WI.

#5 North Carolina Regional: Tar Heels Dominate Singles

The UNC Tar Heels, the reigning NTI champions, looked in good form today, blanking #48 Tulsa 4-0 to advance to Madison. UNC dropped only 10 games in their 5 completed first sets, with the No.4 match in a tiebreaker when play was called. Maria Akkerman was the star of the weekend, losing just three games in her two matches combined. Hayley Carter continued to impress this weekend and Whitney Kay did a complete 180 from yesterday to completely rout her ranked opponent. In the 3rd/4th playoff, #53 Marshall rallied from 1-3 down to take out #68 Yale, with the Herd claiming the win at No.1.

Kick-Off Weekend Intro

I wrote a introduction for the upcoming 2016 ITA Kick-Off Weekend over on the ITA's site that talks about what regionals to keep an eye.

Down below I'll go into some more detail about those regionals to watch then over the next 24 hours keep an eye out for my in-depth preview into each men's regional along with my match predictions.

There are five men’s regionals where I could see the host potentially getting “upset”. In fact there are 2 regionals where I’d consider the host to be a long shot with #20 Texas and #23 Duke both in rebuilding modes after losing four starters off last year’s teams. Duke is starting three freshmen while Texas is starting one freshman and two sophomores that only saw limited action last year. Both have already lost once this season so for either to pull through they’ll need to step it up considerably. In my opinion a case could be made for any of the four in each regional due to how closely they are ranked. The four teams in the Austin regional are separated by just six spots in the most recent rankings (#15 Texas Tech, #17 Mississippi, #20 Texas, #21 Florida) while the four in Durham are separated by eight spots (#19 San Diego, #23 Duke, #26 Vanderbilt, #27 California).

Kickoff Weekend Draft Is Complete

Every year during the draft there are always a few surprises and this year it was everybody jumping on the Columbia regional.  The other surprise was #49 Oregon, #51 San Francisco, and #62 UTSA being #2 seeds. Usually the #2 seeds are top 30 teams but this year it didn't work out that way.  Many of the higher ranked teams decided to be a #3 or #4 seed in what they considered to be a more winnable regional

Kickoff Weekend Draft - 7 Opt-Out in Advance

We're now 2 days away from the ITA National Indoor Kickoff Weekend Draft and so far we've seen 7 schools take a pass with many probably planning on playing other matches that weekend.

The 7 that have taken a pass on the draft are #35 Princeton, #42 Dartmouth, #48 Cornell, #55 Penn State, #56 Texas A&M Corpus Christi, #64 Washington, and #66 Clemson.

Kickoff Weekend Draft - Who's On The Clock

One of the more unknown phenomenons takes place this coming Thursday and 95% of even the biggest college tennis fans probably has never heard of it - it's the ITA National Team Indoor Kickoff Weekend Draft. The draft gets started Thursday morning at 11am eastern and lasts until 2pm.

Below are the full procedures and policies but in a nutshell you have the top 15 teams from the final ITA rankings set up as regional hosts. Since Virginia is the host of next year's National Team Indoors they get a bye and thus the #16 team (South Florida) will be able to host a regional.