• The KillerFrogs

TCU Men's Tennis 2021-2022

Longfrog

Active Member
Real shame we couldn't pull that one out on Sunday. We'd surely be in the driver's seat for a #1 seed at indoors. On paper there should be 15 quality teams in the field plus Washington, who's hosting. I'm sure there will be a few upsets at kickoff weekend, but we'll probably have to work a lot harder to get out of that first match than we would have as the top seed.
 

Jared7

Active Member
Real shame we couldn't pull that one out on Sunday. We'd surely be in the driver's seat for a #1 seed at indoors. On paper there should be 15 quality teams in the field plus Washington, who's hosting. I'm sure there will be a few upsets at kickoff weekend, but we'll probably have to work a lot harder to get out of that first match than we would have as the top seed.
Well, I have memories of losing to Utah State and USD in the ITA Kickoff Weekend, so I'm not looking past Portland and/or Tulsa/Wichita State before projecting how well we'll do in Seattle. We'll host ACU on Thursday before hosting those guys next weekend.

Sebastian Korda lost to Pablo Carreno Busta in 4 sets this morning at Melbourne, so the Norrie killer goes down. PCB will take on Berrettini next.
 

Jared7

Active Member
Alastair Gray is now effectively seeded 15th at Loughborough and will play a qualifier in the first round either tomorrow or Wednesday in the Round of 32.
 

FrogUltimate

Active Member
Looks like Gray plays this morning. Based on what I see, he's playing Tom Hands. A guy who has someone played "professional" tennis for like five years without ever cracking the top 1,200. Fellow Brit
 

Jared7

Active Member
Looks like Gray plays this morning. Based on what I see, he's playing Tom Hands. A guy who has someone played "professional" tennis for like five years without ever cracking the top 1,200. Fellow Brit
Alastair won 3 and 2 and has advanced to the Round of 16. Opponent TBD.

ACU is Thursday and then the ITA Kickoff against Portland. Both at home (indoors).
 

Jared7

Active Member
Gray's next opponent at Loughborough will be Paul Jubb, a Brit who attended South Carolina and won the NCAA's a few years back in singles. He's currently ranked ATP #347, with a CH of #324. It'll be a tough match for Alastair.

The Frogs are 9-0 all-time against ACU, with a most recent 6-0 W in 2018. Obviously, this is a match added by Roditi to the schedule so that we could get a W after possibly 2 L's against Florida and Tennessee. It'll be tomorrow (indoors) at 2:00 p.m.

The new ITA poll should drop shortly. #1 Tennessee got a 4-3 W over Wake Forest yesterday.
 

FrogUltimate

Active Member
Gray's next opponent at Loughborough will be Paul Jubb, a Brit who attended South Carolina and won the NCAA's a few years back in singles. He's currently ranked ATP #347, with a CH of #324. It'll be a tough match for Alastair.

The Frogs are 9-0 all-time against ACU, with a most recent 6-0 W in 2018. Obviously, this is a match added by Roditi to the schedule so that we could get a W after possibly 2 L's against Florida and Tennessee. It'll be tomorrow (indoors) at 2:00 p.m.

The new ITA poll should drop shortly. #1 Tennessee got a 4-3 W over Wake Forest yesterday.
Gray got beat in straights. On a bit of a slide, although Jubb is a guy who is typically main draw of Challengers level player.
 

Jared7

Active Member
Doubles has just kicked off at the tennis center against ACU. Our line-up is: (1) Fomba/Fearnley; (2) Jong/Maxted; and (3) Aguilar/Ruehl. ACU is 0-5 on the year, with L's to 3 Big 12 teams already.
 

Jared7

Active Member
The Frogs - again - are not playing a #6 singles player, so we've forfeited that point and it's now 1-1. The singles line-up is Fomba, Jong, Maxted, Fearnley and Ruehl.
 

Jared7

Active Member
The Frogs clinch an easy 4-1 W! Maxted with the clincher; other W's from Jong and Fearnley. Winning big in an hour and a half is a lot different than 4-hour thrillers against top teams.

Portland and the ITA Kickoff is next on Saturday (with the finals on Sunday involving either Wichita State or Tulsa).
 

Jared7

Active Member
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.
 

Jared7

Active Member
It's hard to do bracketology about the ITA Kickoff because it's so early in the season and not enough is known about each individual team. But Cracked Racquets endeavored to do it anyway in what is now their twice weekly podcast about college tennis. They picked TCU as one of 6 absolute "locks" to advance this weekend, including Tennessee, Baylor, Florida, Georgia and Virginia and joked mostly about whether we should/could win with our now regular 5-player line-up (or even 4). They think Vives will probably play though. And they like our team and are impressed with our season so far. On upset alert are UCF (because Stanford, who barely played the last two years, is visiting), Mississippi (Illinois is visiting), Mississippi State and they also highlighted Arizona in College Station and Pepperdine at L.A. which might make A&M and USC vulnerable. There will be upsets; but maybe not in those places. The biggest match tomorrow (most are Sat-Sun) is Michigan at Wake Forest.
 

Jared7

Active Member
Portland has never played TCU and they haven't played yet this year either. So we don't really know much about them. They were 10-6 last year in the WCC, which is a decent tennis conference (especially Pepperdine). This is the Frogs' 7th consecutive hosting slot in the National Indoors Kickoff and TCU is looking to advance to the Nationals for the 4th consecutive time and the 19th time overall. The TCU-Portland match is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. but it will follow the dual between Wichita State and Tulsa. WSU is the 2nd seed and is currently 3-0, with W's over Saint Louis, Oral Roberts and Purdue - the Frogs are 9-3 all-time v. the Shockers, including the last 7 straight. TU is the 3rd seed and is currently 2-1, with W's over Purdue and Illinois State and tough 3-4 L to Cal. TCU is 14-12 all-time against TU and we've played them for 10 consecutive seasons.

Wake beat Michigan 4-3.
 

Jared7

Active Member
Tulsa leads 2-0, after taking the doubles point. They're leading in most matches at present, so it looks like TU will advance in that half of the bracket. Frogs next. (Maybe some of the hoops fans will venture over to the tennis center after the big W over LSU).

Tulsa now leads 3-1.
 
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