Women's tennis in action at two tournaments this weekend
UNCG at Wake Forest Invitational, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, Winston-Salem, N.C.
UNCG at Riviera/ITA Women's All-American Championships, Oct. 1-9, Pacific Palisades, Calif.
Storylines
- UNCG's women's tennis team will kick off a busy weekend Friday at the Wake Forest Invitational, followed by sending a small contingent to California for the Riviera/ITA Women's All-American Championships, which start Saturday.
- The Spartans will send Alex Whitehead, Dilara Yurtkuran, Annette Rios, Stephanie Falcon, Devon Sutherland and Kayla Gammie to the Wake Forest Invitational in Winston-Salem, N.C., this weekend. The event will be the first collegiate competition at the new Wake Forest tennis complex, which recently hosted the ATP's Winston-Salem Open. The field will consist of 17 teams, including Virginia, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, VCU and Missouri in addition to the host Demon Deacons and UNCG. The tournament will have six singles flights and three doubles flights.
- Sutherland is seeded third in the E Singles flight, while Sutherland and Falcon are the top seed in the C Doubles draw.
- Niltooli Wilkins and Lucy Dougherty will represent UNCG at the Riviera/ITA Women's All-American Championships, which begin at the Los Angeles Tennis Center and move to the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif., after pre-qualifying. In singles play, Wilkins will face Virginia's Li Xi on Saturday in a pre-qualifying singles match. Those two met two weeks ago at the UVa Fall Invitational, with Xi – ranked fifth nationally among freshmen/newcomers by the ITA – claiming a 6-3, 4-6, 6-2 win. Wilkins and Dougherty will take on Southern Cal's Gabriella DeSimone and Zoe Scandalis – seeded seventh at the tournament – in a pre-qualifying doubles match Saturday.
- UNCG was last in action at the UVa Fall Invitational, which saw Wilkins advance to the A Singles consolation final and Wilkins and Dougherty fall in the A Doubles final after knocking off the No. 9 team in the nation in the opening round. Sutherland and Falcon fell in the B Doubles final.
- Falcon leads UNCG with a perfect 6-0 singles record so far on the season, while Wilkins is 5-2. Gammie is 2-0 and Whitehead is 3-0. In doubles action, Whitehead and Yurtkuran are 3-0 together, while Dougherty and Wilkins are 6-1. As a team, UNCG is 14-3 in doubles so far this fall.
- The Spartans have two more fall tournaments on the slate in 2011: the USTA/ITA Regional Championships in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Oct. 20-24 and the Kitty Harrison Invitational, also in Chapel Hill, from Nov. 4-6.
- UNCG -