USTA News

Stanford earned their trip to nationals by winning the USTA Campus Championship Northern California back in November.  Stacy Kaufman, President of Stanford Club Tennis, mechanical engineering major and now blogger writes about her team's experience at the USTA Natioanl Campus Championships. Go Stanford!!

 

The final day of the 2011 Campus Championships started off early in the morning with some expert court squeegeeing. After heavy rain on Friday night, we spent some quality time drying the courts before getting started a little late. A solid performance on all counts (highlighted by Morgane’s closing out an undefeated weekend in singles!) led to a win over Penn State to close out the tournament (we finished 11th, affectionately dubbed by Matt "double first place!").

 

After the match, we finally had some down time to catch up a little homework and get some rest! Roland passed out in about two seconds, but all the other guys engaged in an intense game of poker until we were ready for dinner.

 

Major thunderstorms hit the area in the evening, so the finals got moved to the Duke indoor facility. We ventured through the storm to a sweet Mexican place for dinner (definitely check out the Cosmic Cantina next time you’re in Durham!), and Jon impressed us all by downing an entire foot-long burrito. Once he finally finished eating we went over to cheer on UCLA in the finals. Very impressive performance – congrats, Bruins! Great to see another California team take home the title.

 

We have to be up by 3:30 AM to get our flight back to California, so it’s time to sign off! Another great year at the Campus Championships...until next time – GO CARD!

 

 

Long day here in Cary. Started off with an all-California match-up with UC-Santa Barbara in the round of 16. Our new buddies from Oakland Univ. came and cheered us on, which we definitely appreciated.

 

After trading doubles and singles matches, we ended up losing a sudden death point in a supertiebreaker in the mixed. Heartbreaking way to lose, but it was a great match by both teams. Kudos to UCSB for being so fun throughout and being such good opponents! We look forward to playing them again at CaliCup in a few weeks.

 

After that loss, we rallied to defeat Texas A&M before losing another close match to Illinois. In spite of the disappointing results, we still managed to find plenty of things to laugh about. One ongoing mission during this tournament has been to create some new nicknames for people – Thunder and MegaTron are a couple of the names suggested that stuck.

 

One final match here in North Carolina tomorrow. The semifinal teams are all the same as last year (though the match ups are different, with UCLA taking on UCF and Cal playing Florida), so there should be some exciting matches to watch as well.

 

Go Card!

 

 

 

Day 1 of the National Campus Championships is in the books! After a long day of travel on Wednesday, we were excited to get started.

 

Our pool included UT-San Antonio, Northern Colorado, and Northwestern. Thursday was a great chance to get lots of players involved, including several who made their Nationals debut. Roland, Morgane, Sonali, and Tep all played their first matches at the Campus Championships, and it was great to see them dive in with so much enthusiasm! Sonali commented in reflecting on her first experience that "we met a lot of awesome people…and won three matches, and had a lot of fun!" Roland was impressed by the amount of work that went into the tournament, something that we all certainly appreciate!

 

Highlights from our matches included stellar play from all our singles players, who surrendered just two games all day. Men’s doubles also recorded a shutout.

 

Off the court, we enjoyed getting to know the team from Oakland University in Michigan. They were excited when we knew that they were from Michigan and not California, and kept us all in stitches with their awesome stories. We’re looking forward to supporting each other on Friday, when we take on UCSB in the first round of the Gold Bracket. We play each other at CaliCup, so it'll be fun to play them on a bigger stage! Good representation in the final 16 by the California schools - way to go, everyone!

 

One of the best parts of Nationals is just all the time we spend together as a team, 95% of which involves some or all of us laughing hysterically! Matt kept us all entertained today by tweeting updates to our teammates back in Palo Alto. Track us on Twitter by following CardClubTennis to stay up to date on all our matches here in Cary.

 

Quote of the day: "Go tennis!!" ~ Dan (heard during our match with Northwestern - on numerous occasions!)

 

 

 

The Stanford Club team is making final preparations to head off to Cary, NC on Wednesday morning, and when I say morning I mean the wee hours of the morning. We are taking a 6 am flight out of San Francisco to ensure that we get to the tennis center before the captains meeting and to squeeze in a short warm up. It will be a long day of travel!

 

We have a team of 10 heading off to nationals along with 2 team coaches. This team includes 5 players who attended nationals for Stanford at least once and are excited to return. It will be a new venue for all but two of us. This is the first time the 10 of us are playing together on the same single team. The team includes players from our two teams that met in the finals of the NorCal Sectionals. We have a great group going, and it is really going to be a fun trip!

 

Since we are on the quarter system, we had spring break 2 weeks ago. Prior to break we were finalizing our team, by playing a lot of matches. It has recently become difficult to select the final team, because we have so many club members who want to come. (Our club team is over 70 members and 30 wanted to try out for final team of 10). We had singles and doubles ladders, which resulted in many matches played over the course of a quarter. Since the team selection we have been playing a lot of tennis together. Singles, doubles, mixed and we invited other members of our team to practice with us. This past weekend, we went to Cal to play matches against Cal and Davis. It was a good warm up for us and got us back into playing full WTT matches.

 

One of our coaches and I have made all of the travel arrangements for the team. We will be staying at a hotel, although we had been searching to find a house that could accommodate all of us. Houses are ideal for this team situation, but are hard to find in Cary (well at least ones for 12 people!). It is also unfortunate that hotels are so far from the tennis center and that will make it difficult to go back to the hotel between matches. But that allows us to spend more time around the tennis center and meet other teams. We are excited to catch up with the other California schools that we are good friends with. We are also looking forward to seeing the teams that we met last year and making new friends.

 

We have been able to look through the draw and see the teams in our pool. We were excited about not having an 8 am first round, because that would feel like a 5 am match for us. We have pool play matches at 10:00 am against Texas--San Antonio, 2:00 pm against University of Northern Colorado, and 6:00 pm against Northwestern. We have not played any of these teams before at nationals so we are looking forward to meeting and playing these schools!

 

See you all on Wednesday night or Thursday!