The ITA Kickoff Weekend starts tomorrow, so it's time to look forward to, aside from the NCAA's in May, the pre-eminent Spring event for college teams. The Kickoff is essentially the first two rounds of the Indoor Nationals, which will culminate in Seattle this year with a 16-team team tourney a few weeks from now. There are 15 sites for 4-team tourneys this weekend, so 60 teams are fighting for 15 slots in Seattle. (Washington, the Nationals host, gets a bye to the 16-team field). The objective is to punch a ticket to the Nationals by winning 2 matches. The sites are selected each June based on last year's year-end rankings; by finishing in the Top 15 annually, TCU is almost always a host site. Then, the top 60 teams not hosting hold a "draft" where they can select the site they wish to go to. Last June, it took awhile before anyone chose Ft. Worth; indicating perceived strength for our team because teams wanted to avoid us. This weekend, we're hosting Portland, our first round opponent, and Tulsa and Wichita State and the winners of the first round on Saturday will play Sunday to determine the advancing team. For elite teams like TCU, the mark of success is to at least advance to the Nationals every year. But there always upsets and TCU has fallen victim to this in the recent past, to Utah State and San Diego.
The advantage in making the Nationals is that, usually (i.e, pre-COVID), this guarantees at least 3 matches against top-level competition; including teams that one might not normally play. So you want to go and win at least 1-2 matches so as to vastly enhance your credentials for purposes of ITA rankings. Normally, I'm satisfied with that and because the Frogs are usually not as good indoors as outdoors, it's enough to make the Nationals. But this year, being ranked 3rd, I think we might actually have a chance at winning the tourney, which we've never done (although SMU has). So now, I'm hoping that we win not only the Kickoff Ft. Worth regional and advance and then be seeded as high as possible and play the weakest possible opponents in Seattle.
We'll see. We'll be heavily favored over Portland, but both the Shockers and Golden Hurricane are good, sometimes very good, teams and are certainly capable of advancing. Tulsa, in particular, has "upset" the Frogs often early in various seasons and while together in the WAC. I think we're probably for Wichita State to win that bracket so as to avoid Tulsa. But that might be a case of "be careful what you wish for." It's less than 2 days away (2:00 p.m. Saturday) and I'm concerned that we only had 5 players available for singles today.