Shippensburg to Host PSAC Individual Tennis Championships This Weekend
Oct. 5, 2006
Preview courtesy of PSAC Assistant Commissioner Will
Adair
SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. - The first two of nine scheduled Pennsylvania
State Athletic Conference (PSAC) Fall Championships will get under
way Saturday,
October 7, as Shippensburg
University
is set to host the women’s and men’s individual tennis championships.
Saturday’s action begins at 11 a.m.
Both the men’s and the women’s singles and doubles will be played
on Saturday and Sunday in a single-elimination format. Tournament play on
Sunday begins at 8:30 a.m.
In the women’s singles bracket, California junior Inga Chilingaryan is the top seed and defending champion. She did not lose a set on her way to last year’s title, and won her quarterfinal and final matches by counts of 6-0, 6-0.
Chilingaryan’s toughest competition could come from among her own teammates. Freshman Nina Reiswich, the No. 2 seed, recently finished second to Chilingaryan in the finals of the ITA Regionals. Vulcan junior Helena Van Eysendeyk is the No. 3 seed and Slippery Rock’s Kayla Blackburn comes in at No. 4. Like Reiswich, Van Eysendeyk did not participate in last year’s championship. Blackburn, who advanced to the semifinals last year, is the top returning player from the tournament outside of Chilingaryan.
In women’s doubles, the California duo of Yumi Matsuto and Lisa Santoro are the expected favorites. Matsuo teamed with Chilingaryan to win the ITA doubles two weeks ago.
Bloomsburg’s Emily Murphy and Torie Cunningham
should provide the most competition. The pair advanced to the semifinals
in ITA play.
Like Chilingaryan, Kutztown’s Santiago Baquerizo has a title to defend.
The top seed breezed through last year’s championship, which
included a 6-0, 6-3 win over teammate Radoslaw Hlubinski in the finals.
At the ITA tournament,
Baquerizo took runner-up honors, coming out on the short end of a 7-6,
6-0 decision in the finals.
Other top competition includes second-seed Dan Gal of Bloomsburg, third-seed Lukas Labistch of Kutztown and fourth-seeded Greg Bennett of Millersville. Gal was a semifinalist in last year’s tournament and is coming off a quarterfinal showing from the ITA. Labitsch won a pair of matches at the ITA, but like Gal, lost a hard-fought match to the tournament’s No. 3 seed.
Gal will team with Ryan Chow to form the top-seeded doubles unit. Those two went to the semifinals before bowing out of the ITA tourney. Kutztown’s Rubens Vianna won the doubles competition last year with Somdeep Appineni. He will pair with Arpit Sharma in this year’s tournament. Also back from last year is East Stroudsburg’s Jeff Kurz, who advanced to the finals with Pat Luchowski during the PSAC event. This year he will try to take one more step with teammate Andrew Sorsi.
In its current format, the individual championships were inaugurated in the 2003-04 academic year and had been scheduled as a spring event for the first three years. The individual championships were always slated for a week after the team championships. This is the first year the event will take place in the fall. The team championship will remain in the spring.
- Lady Raider Tennis -
