Men's Tennis Opens Fall With Pair of Tournaments
Sep 18, 2014 | Men's Tennis
NEW ORLEANS - The Tulane men's tennis team gets the 2014 fall season underway this weekend when the squad of eight splits up and half will travel to Houston for the Rice Fall Invitational and half will venture up to Princeton, N.J. for the Princeton Farnsworth Ivy Invitational.
"The first tournament is always an exciting time for the guys," Tulane head coach Mark Booras said. "We've been training very hard for the past three weeks and they all had good summers so we are hoping to get a really quick jump on the fall season."
Sophomore Sebastian Rey, senior Cedric Rutsaert, freshman Constantin Schmitz and senior Iain Sneddon will travel to Houston. Junior Dominik Koepfer, sophomore Chi-Shan Jao and junior twins Alex and Ian Van Cott will play in New Jersey.
At Rice, the four will all compete in the one main-draw in singles, while Rey and Schmitz, and Rutsaert and Sneddon will pair up in doubles. The tournament is played at Rice's George Brown Tennis Center.
Koepfer, the 98th-ranked singles player, will play in the Tiger Draw at Princeton, while the 30th-ranked doubles pair of Jao and Koepfer will compete in the Orange Draw.
Alex Van Cott will play in the Cordish Draw, Ian Van Cott will participate in the Jadwin Draw and Jao will play in the Nassau Draw. The Van Cott twins are on the doubles Black Draw.
"We are expecting some solid results because of our hard work, but on the other side of that, we are playing two very tough tournaments and the competition level is going to be very high and the guys will be pushed from the very beginning," Booras added. "We will get a good gauge of where we stand and what we need to work on after this weekend."
The Princeton Farnsworth Ivy Invitational will have eight 16-player singles flights and two doubles draws with 32 pairs. Joining host Princeton are players from Yale, Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Michigan, Virginia Tech, Iowa, Tulane, Miami (Fla.), Notre Dame, Pepperdine, St. John's, Buffalo, Monmouth, Marist, Army, NJIT and Binghamton.
In singles play, main-draw contests will be best-of-three sets, and back-draw singles contests will have a tiebreaker for a third set. Doubles matches will be an eight-game pro-set format match. All matches will use the no-ad format approved this year for college tennis, speeding up the end of each game.
Play will start at 8:30 a.m. each day with the Lenz Tennis Center's 20 courts all expected to be in use. In the event of inclement weather, Jadwin Gym and other area indoor courts will host matches.
After this weekend, the Green Wave will travel to Tuscaloosa, Ala., for the Alabama Four Man on Sept. 26-28.
Players Mentioned
