Tennis is BAAACK!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to the blog for the 2012-2013 season. You’ll have noticed some of the new improvements we’ve made to the blog. As in, we haven’t changed squat. The grand schemes for expanding to women’s tennis and covering more teams pretty much went out the window, as I got lazy, and pretty much nobody wanted to write about DIII tennis for free. Go figure. Anyways, I was going to do a short little post about what the NCAA DI tennis rule changes could mean for DIII, but it seems like the whole freaking tennis playing world managed to talk some sense into the NCAA.

I was also going to cover the ITA summer circuit events this summer, but some of the draws are very difficult to read online, so it was damn near impossible to tell which players were playing for who. Regardless, here are few things I noticed from the summer tournaments:

California

1. Nick Ballou has continued to play very well. Playing in arguably the best region of the summer circuits, the top Kingsman did very well against a lot of tough DI competition. Ballou made two finals and two semifinals in the four-week circuit, and he had to be one of the top circuit point earners in the country (even though nobody cares about that point system at all). To top it all off, he advanced to the quarters of the National Summer Championships, beating one of Georgia Tech’s starters on the way. His self-congratulatory tweets might not be endearing, but he’s a damn good player and the odds-on favorite to win the upcoming ITA nationals (though he’ll have to go through the brutal California regional to do it). #Humblebragchamp2012 @TotesMcGotes

2. Mixed bag for P-P. The Hens probably had more players compete in the summer circuits than any other team, but they didn’t exactly make a splash. I would have expected Weichert to make a quarterfinal on a good weekend, but Sabel actually had the best results of any Pomona-Pitzer player. With Meyer’s graduation, the Sage Hens will need someone to step up huge at the #1 position. Perhaps it’s Sabel’s time to shine.

3 Watch out for Skyler Butts. The 3-star Stag-to-be had a very solid summer season. He got the quarters of one tournament and the semis of another (including 10-point tiebreaker victories over Sabel and fellow incoming freshman Lestter Yeh). He also teamed with Yeh to get to the finals in one of the doubles tournaments. With his victory over Yeh, he seems to be the freshman most likely to make an immediate impact for CMS.

Northeast

1. Is Eric Halpern ready to fill the void left by the graduations of Pottish and Goodwin? I don’t know, but the fact that he won the Middlebury circuit can’t be a bad sign. Sure, the tournament didn’t have the deepest draw of the Northeast circuits, but he won all four tiebreakers he played on the way to the victory. I’m not sure if this is confirmed, but his play will be even more important with the supposed departure of Kowalski.

2. The draws that are available online don’t really give much more information about what happened out in the Northeast this summer, but Fitzgibbons had a good tournament on his home courts. This could be a very telling year for the Panthers. With resurgent Bowdoin, experienced Williams, and recruiting goliath, Amherst, all hungry for a NESCAC title, will this once-proud program be relegated to 4th?

Mid-Atlantic

1. On the whole, DIII players got their clocks cleaned in the Mid-Atlantic tournaments. Though I wouldn’t have expected them to make a strong showing in the Mid-Atlantic, a couple Wash U players made the best showings out of the DIII players. Parker Chang came out of nowhere to make the quarterfinals of the stacked UNC-Chapel Hill regional, and Kevin Chu ousted a trio of DI players in 10-pointers on his way to the finals of the Mary Washington tournament. A good sign for a team hoping to improve on their consecutive Final Fours streak.

2. On a less positive note, Washington and Lee’s Taylor Shamshiri had a couple good tournaments this Summer, but with the departure of Hayden White, he knows that he’ll be ALL ALONE this year for the Generals. W&L had one good weekend last season, but they are probably the top 25 team most likely to fall out of the top 30 in the upcoming season.

Midwest

Nothing bullet point-worthy happened in the Midwest regionals. With the exception of a mini-run by Sam Miles of Depauw, DIII players basically got categorically smoked by DI competition. Looking at the draws did bring up a couple story lines for the upcoming season. With a decent recruiting class coming in, and great returning leadership in Sam Miles, can Depauw return to prominence? Case Western probably had the best overall team performance in the Midwest regionals. They also have a talented recruiting class on the way in and a reputation for developing players. Will that be enough for them to leapfrog Carnegie Mellon and earn a Pool C bid?

Central

I honestly don’t have anything to say about the Central region circuit. Several DIII players played, but basically nobody did better or worse than you would expect them too. One of Bowdoin’s incoming freshmen won a couple of rounds, which I guess is promising for them, but it wasn’t anything special. Trinity’s Charlie Curtis won a couple of rounds. Kevin Chu won the backdraw of a tournament.  And Depauw’s Alec Kaczkowski had a decent tournament. That’s about it.

Mountain

The Mountain region has to be by far the worst tennis region in the US, but by golly, they at least provided one story line:

Kenyon’s Colin Haas got to the finals of one of the regionals, and he won the doubles tournament. Sure, he got there thanks in large part to a couple withdrawals. And sure, the draws weren’t exactly the strongest in the world, but it least provided a reminder to the amazing season the Lords had last year. Near the end of the year Coach Thielke tried to put Haas in the doubles lineup at #1 to preserve his dominant duo of Razumovsky and Williams at #2, but the NCAA squashed that. Kenyon’s #1 team played huge in the NCAA tournament, and the rest is history, but look for Haas to contribute in the doubles lineup this year, as the Lords reload to take another shot at the title.

Whittier’s Chris Schommer is also in the Mountain region. This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but they return the nucleus of a solid team, and are possibly bringing in the pieces they need to pull everything together. Do I think they will qualify for Pool C? No. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they take a match of Redlands, P-P, or Cal Lu this year.

Southeast

The Southeast circuit was entirely saturated by DI players. I didn’t really see anything worth mentioning. Correct me if I’m wrong, but outside of Emory, there doesn’t seem to be any good DIII teams in the Southeast.

Texas

The state of Texas: lots of tennis players, incredibly deep in DI and JuCo, relatively shallow in DIII. (Two of the tournaments also didn’t label the players with their schools, so I could only basically go on players who’s names I recognized). With most of the Trinity players AWOL, the main story line coming out of Texas circuit is UT-Tyler! Believe it or not, Patriot Kevin Singer, who I believe battled injuries for the bulk of the 2012 season, won a trio of 10-pointers in the Texas A&M tournament and advanced to the quarterfinals of the 128-draw tournament. Singer’s improbable run calls to question whether or not the UT-Tyler can get back into the top 25 and rekindle their old rivalry with Trinity. The last few installments of the rivalry haven’t been very competitive. Perhaps with Singer and Spencer leading a group of sophomores with a year of college tennis under their belts, Tyler will be able to return to the rankings.