College on Tour Weekly Recap/Results 6/22- 6/28

University of Kentucky athletes not only did extremely well in the NBA draft this week they also performed exceptional well on the tennis court with Tom Jomby ('14) winning a Future in Spain, Alex Musialek ('12) winning a Future in France, Eric Quigley ('12) making the semis in Canada, Trey Yates (Soph) winning the Atlanta City Open and thus getting a wild card into qualies at the ATP 250 in Atlanta, and Jesse Witten ('05) winning US Open National Playoff Southern Sectional and thus getting a chance to compete for a qualifying wild card at the US Open.  

It was pro singles title #1 for Jomby after he defeated #369 Roberto Ortega-Olmedo 6-2, 6-4 in the finals of the Palma del Rio, Spain $15K Future. Jomby had come up short in his 2 previous finals - Tunisia F13 (L to D Medvedev 6-4, 6-0) in April 2015 & Egypt F33 (L to M Safwat 6-4, 6-4) in November 2014. Jomby is now 27-12 on the year.

Musialek's 1-6, 6-2, 6-3 win over #1080 Pedro Martinez Portero in the finals of the Toulon, France $15K Future was his 2nd singles title this year and 7th of his career (all Futures). Musialek's previous titles were in Iran (1/15), Iran (12/14), Iran (9/14), Iran (8/14), Thailand (2/14), and Israel (3/13). Musialek is now 26-14 on the year. 

Emilio Gomez (USC '13) won his 2nd Future title of the year and 6th of his career with a 7-6(3), 6-4 win over Sekou Bangoura (Florida '08) at the USA F18 in Rochester. Gomez's other title this year came at the Columbia F1 with his other 4 all coming on his home soil in Ecuador - 2 in 2014, 1 in 2013, 1 in 2009. 

Weekly News

Wisconsin announced that former graduate Danny Westerman was returning to Madison to take over the vacant head coaching job. Westerman had spent the last 9 years in Denver as head coach and had done a tremendous job with the Pioneers.  Full release here

Here is my updated D1 Men's Head Coaching Carousel - if you know of others that needed to be added let me know. 

The ITA announced the 2015 Collegiate All-Star Team - full release here:

Best Teams Not To Win A Natty In The Last 10 Years: 2006 Georgia Bulldogs

The 2006 Georgia Bulldogs seemed like they were a team that was destined to give Manny Diaz his 3rd NCAA Championship and the schools 5th after they spent virtually the entire season ranked #1.

The experienced team started 3 seniors, 2 juniors, and a sophomore and 1 of the juniors was none other than big John Isner.  Isner won the ITA All Americans in the fall by defeating Baylor's Lars Poerschke 7-6, 7-6 in the final. Georgia's eventual #6 singles player, Strahinja Bobusic, picked up 3 top 35 wins in the fall including a win over #2 Ludovic Walter of Duke.

Luis Flores was the lone sophomore and he started off the year playing at #1 singles. Flores, who was a top 10 ITF junior with a pair of wins over this guy named Novak Djokovic, actually joined the team in January of the year prior but wasn't eligible to play until January 2006. Antonio Ruiz teamed with John Isner to win the 2005 NCAA Doubles Championship but then took the fall off to play in pro events.  Colin Purcell was coming off a year where he went 19-4 splitting time between #4 and #5 and he had a decent fall but an injury kept him out of the lineup for the first 3 matches of the 2006 season.  Matic Omerzel was coming off a 16-7 year where he played mostly at #3 and then he made it to the finals of the SEC Indoors in January 2006.

College on Tour Weekly Recap/Results 6/15 - 6/21

Another great week for former college players as both Evan King (Michigan '13) and Clay Thompson (UCLA '14) each won their first professional singles title.  Thompson didn't drop a set or get broke all week in route to winning his title in Manzanillo, Mexico while King only dropped 1 set in route to his title Harare, Zimbabwe.

Kevin Anderson (Illinois '07) made his 2nd career final in an ATP 500 event (lost to Dimitrov 7-6(5) in 3rd in Acapulco in February 2014) but came up just short against #3 Andy Murray.

Adrien Puget (UCLA '14) made his second final of the year (won Spain Future in April) before falling 6-4, 7-6 to Zhizhen Zhang in the France Future.

Weekly News

Here are some of the college tennis news stories from the past week:

• Tommy Paul, who was a Georgia commit, decided to sign with Nike and turn pro as was announced by Colette Lewis at ZooTennis.  I was hoping Paul would end up at Georgia but with his recent results (2 Futures Titles & French Open Jr Title) and the Nike deal you can't blame him for choosing the route he did. Only time will tell if the decision turns out to a be a wise one.

• Georgia lost and gained an assistant coach in the last week. Will Glenn stepped down last Friday after 10 years as the assistant coach but today it was announced that former Georgia All-American Bo Hodge was returning to Athens after spending the last 4 years as John Roddick's assistant at Oklahoma. 

Best Teams Not To Win A Natty In The Last 10 Years: 2005 Baylor Bears

After seeing that Connor Smith was up to 200 in the latest ATP rankings that got me thinking about how Ohio State didn't win a national championship the year he played at #6 singles or for that matter the year he played at #3.  Then I started thinking about some of the other teams that were seemingly loaded but came up short when it mattered the most. So I decided to go back through the last 10 years and pick out those teams the many considered favorites and replay the moment where their season came to an end.

I'll start off with the 2004-05 season and this is a pretty obvious one.  The Matt Knoll coached Baylor Bears were the defending national champs and they were ranked #1 all season long in every poll released except for the last one.

College on Tour Weekly Recap/Results 6/8 - 6/14

There was 1 former college player that picked up a title this week with Tennys Sandgren (Tennessee '11) winning the $15K Charlottesville, Virginia Future with a 6-4, 6-4 win over Ernesto Escobedo.  It was Sandgren's 9th career pro title (8 Futures and 1 Challenger)

Roberto Cid (South Florida Sr) made it to the finals of the $10K Bursa, Turkey Future before falling 7-5, 6-3 to #253 Yannick Jankovits.

Alex Sarkissian (Pepperdine '14) made it to the finals of the $10K Hong Kong Future before retiring down 4-1 in the 1st to #213 Ti Chen.

In the College on Tour tab I added the point totals and prize money that the guys are playing for each week.

Drake's Alen Salibasic Wins Elite 89 Award (Again)

I saw this a few weeks ago but didn't actually get around to reading what it was all about until just a few days ago.  The award goes to the student-athlete with the highest GPA from all those who participated in the NCAA Championships and who had participated on the team for at least 2 years.

The video below the Drake release is an interview with Salibasic conducted by the legendary Dave "Koz" Kozlowski.  Near the end it mentions that Salibasic will be heading to graduate school at Princeton and he'll also be a graduate assistant coach with the tennis team.

State of the Union - College Tennis Today

My main priority over the last 4 months was to keep the content up to date so I didn't do much with the design or layout.  Now that we've hit the off-season I've been trying to spiff up the site a bit. This was first stab at doing a blog so most of the layout and features I copied from other sites but other features I've had to research to figure out how they work. I was just able to figure out how to make a scrolling text box which I thought was kind of neat and I've recently learned how to make a picture in picture page (iframe) where you can have as many different windows within a page as you want (see scoreboard pic on bottom). It seems like to do anything semi-complex you have to understand html and I'm learning more about it daily.

Season Ending UTR Top 10s (All Divisions)

Now that we're officially in the college tennis off-season I thought I'd take another look back at the year-end singles rankings across all divisions.  The one way to compare the rankings across divisions is to use each player's season ending Universal Tennis Rating so what I did is I pulled the UTR Top 10 from each division then at the bottom I have them combined into one list.  While Division 1 is by far the deepest you can see there are good players throughout all divisions.

College on Tour Weekly Recap/Results 6/1 - 6/7

It was a very good week for former and current college players on the ATP Pro Tour with 3 former college guys and 1 current winning titles.  4 former college guys finished as runner-up as did 1 current player.  Georgia recruit Tommy Paul won the French Open Junior Championship though it won't be known for a few months whether he'll end up in Athens or choose to go pro.

Noah Rubin Turns Pro

After Wake Forest signed Dennis Uspensky this past week it seemed like the writing was on the wall and today it was confirmed that Noah Rubin has left Wake Forest and turned pro. Rubin came to Wake Forest when many thought he wouldn't after winning the 2014 Wimbledon Junior Championships so you've got to give him credit for at least coming and experiencing college tennis for one year.

After much contemplation I have decided to turn pro. It's been an unforgettable year at WF due to the amazing people I was surrounded by.

— Noah Rubin (@Noahrubin33) June 6, 2015

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

Final ITA Singles & Doubles Rankings Released

The ITA released the final singles and doubles rankings today below are both the men's and women's rankings.  There is a comparison of the final ITA rankings versus each player's Universal Tennis rankings - check out the chart to see how they compare.

Men's Singles #1: Axel Alvarez (Oklahoma)
Men's Doubles #1: Julian Lenz/Diego Galeano (Baylor)
Women's Singles #1: Robin Anderson (UCLA)
Women's Doubles #1: Erin Routliffe/Maya Jansen (Alabama)

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.