Regional Women’s Recap: The Sewanee and Mary Washington ITAs

After a long weekend of superb tennis, we’ve crowned our singles and doubles regional champions from the Atlantic South! Since the Atlantic South is so great, we obviously get two regionals. However, since D3ASouthWomens is slightly less great, you’re only getting one regional recap from me. Once again Mary Washington and Sewanee graciously hosted their respective ITA Regionals — shout out to the coaches and staff that made it possible for these massive tournaments to run smoothly. You all need more credit. I see you. For those of you who live under a rock, here are the winners of the championship draws from last weekend:

Singles Champions: Ysabel Gonzalez-Rico (Emory) and Rachel Summers (Mary Washington)

Doubles Champions: Ysabel Gonzalez-Rico/Briget Harding (Emory) and Vinaya Rao/Melissa Strome (Carnegie Mellon)

Since I personally only take my #fakenews in the form of listicles, this regional recap is going to follow suit. So, here are the 10 things that I took away from this weekend.

  1. Emory is looking untouchable compared to their ASouth competition. I don’t think anyone is particularly surprised by this fact but it needs to be stated nonetheless. The singles semifinal of the Sewanee region included 3 Emory players while the doubles semifinal also featured 3 Emory teams. Freshman Gonzalez Rico beat teammate and 1 seed Harding in the final, then the two continued their emphatic success in the doubles final. By “emphatic” I mean they lost 7 total games in the tournament. Talk about dominating. It will be interesting to see if Coach Bryant uses these results to determine lineup in the spring or if Harding’s seniority will keep her at 1 singles.
  2. Rachel Summers put her game together to become the unexpected champion. Huge congratulations to sophomore Rachel Summers. Her freshman campaign was pretty impressive, as she went 18-7 at what looks like primarily 3 singles, but it’s still a huge leap for her to make from winning most of her matches at 3 to winning the regional championship.
    Coach Art was so excited he debated keeping the trophy for himself.

    The draw this year at the Mary Wash regional was relatively wide-open since there were no returning 1 singles players from last year except for sophomore Johanna Ranta-aho from CNU, who was seeded 4 and ended up getting taken out by Anjali Kashyap from Hopkins in the quarterfinals. However, I cannot and do not want to take credit away from Summers, who obviously practiced this summer and was able to capitalize on the draw to win the tournament. According to the UMW twitter, she is the first Eagle to win this event since 2000, which is further back than I can even remember, so this is a huge deal for her and her team and hopefully portends a very successful season for the Eagles.

  3. None of the other regional teams are going to break the top 6 this year. By the last day of both regionals, there were no players left from any of the teams outside of the top 6. Sure, there were standouts from other teams, including Ranta-aho from CNU who made the quarterfinals of the Mary Wash regional, or Dasha Safarian from Rhodes who made the quarters of the Sewanee regional, but one player does not a team make.
  4. Johns Hopkins might be looking at a bit of a down year. They clearly have one glimmer of hope in the form of freshman Anjali Kashyap, who had a great run to make the finals of the singles draw. But Hop only saw 2 singles players make it to the round of 16, which for them is a bit of a letdown. Similarly, none of their 3 teams in the doubles championship draw made it past the first round. I’m not sure if this is due to tough draws or not bringing all their players or something else, but the Bluejays definitely had a tough weekend and at this rate will need to get back to the drawing board and come up with something more as a team if they want to have a good season in the spring. That being said, I do understand that the fall and spring seasons are entirely different beasts so here’s to hoping I’m wrong and that the Bluejays will come back with a vengeance in February.
  5. Carnegie Mellon is doing as expected. I said in my earlier post that of the A South teams that aren’t Emory, Carnegie Mellon has been the most consistent team in that next tier and it seems to be a similar picture this year.
    Was the umbrella the deciding factor?

    Both teams in the doubles final were from CMU (also 10-8 in the third set breaker to decide the champion… that’s pretty intense) and they also put 2 players into the semifinals. Cori Sidell, who lost to teammate Hannah Rosenfeld in the quarterfinals, was also the 1 seed in the tournament. Since college tennis is a team sport, I think CMU had the best overall performance at the Mary Washington regional in terms of getting the most players the furthest.

  6. Washington and Lee’s lineup determining challenge matches are going to be really intense this year. Usually you can kind of tell which one or two players are going to be at the top of the lineup based on their performance in individual tournaments, but I’m not quite sold on any of the Washington and Lee girls just based on this weekend. Michelle Fleenor and Valerie Marshall both made the singles quarterfinals. Fleenor then took a tough 0 and 2 loss to Rosenfield though, and Marshall’s road to the quarterfinals was assisted by a retirement from 2 seed Kait Brogan in the round of 16. On the other hand, Maddie Webber played a tough 3 set match against JHU finalist Kashyap in the round of 16, so it’s hard to say who deserves the top spot in the General’s lineup. Only time will tell.
  7. I wish I could comment on Sewanee’s performance but honestly idk. It must be tough for the poor Tigers to be stuck in the same region with Emory. The Tigers didn’t have a bad tournament- far from it.
    Stretching #gainz

    They put 3 players in the singles quarterfinals and freshman Catherine (or Caroline… it says Caroline on the roster but Catherine on twitter) Owen made the semifinals. Owen and Clementina Davila made the finals of the doubles draw. In a more forgiving regional, they could have easily sent some girls to Nationals, but it just wasn’t meant to be this year. I’m going to reserve judgement on this Sewanee team until I see them play at indoors in February.

  8. It pays to be a freshman. It seems like the young blood always came out on top in this tournament. For example, freshman Gonzalez Rico beat her senior teammate in the championship match at Sewanee. Sewanee’s best performer was Owen, a freshman. Hopkin’s best performer, Kashyap, is also a freshman. CMU freshman Hannah Rosenfield outlasted her senior teammate and number 1 seed Cori Sidell to make the semifinals of the Mary Washington draw. In the doubles final, the freshman/sophomore duo from CMU outlasted the senior/sophomore. Rachel Summers is a sophomore, which isn’t a freshman but I would still count that as young. What ever happened to senior experience winning matches? Doesn’t seem to hold here. Is this due to lack of expectations and pressure? People getting worse throughout college? Freshmen actually playing tennis the summer before school? As I said before, spring season is an entirely different show than the fall, so we’ll see if the young blood continues to dominate or if that senior experience finally rears its head. I’m looking forward to it.
  9. I want to be twitter besties with Sewanee’s twitter account handler. Like seriously I know this site is all about letting the rackets doing the talking but sometimes talking with words on twitter can be fun too. I seriously love interacting with all the teams on twitter. CMU is clutch with the score updates and Sewanee with the fitness competition updates. The D3 community is the best and I’m not even biased.
  10. The Lego Ninjago movie was not as good as I was hoping. I’m not sure anyone will be surprised by this but it hurts nonetheless. Let this be a lesson to me in expectation management.

So there they are, my 10 takeaways from Regionals weekend. I clearly got a little lazy towards the end there, but I secretly have an exhausting life and I’m honestly a little scared of the Headmaster (and authority in general) so I need to get this out before he revokes my title and gives it to one of the other eager D3 women’s potential bloggers lining up to take me out. All 0 of them.

In all seriousness, congratulations to our regional champions and best of luck to them at Nationals! I know they will represent our region with pride and I will be following along. For the rest of the girls whose fall seasons are drawing to a close, I look forward what you will bring to the tennis court in the spring. Email me or comment below to let me know what I may have missed about Regionals!

-ASW

2 thoughts on “Regional Women’s Recap: The Sewanee and Mary Washington ITAs

  1. Derek from State Farm

    Felix Mann, if you’re reading this, somebody ACTUALLY wants to be your best friend (see comment above about Sewanee Twitter handle).

    1. Not Felix

      Eric from Swarthmore – Felix retired long ago

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