Late in the 2023 season, the NCAA’s Division I committee approved a drastic plan for the annual individual tennis championships: The team and individual championships are no longer simultaneous. The team, singles and doubles championships used to all be in the spring, which posed several issues that the pilot plan hoped to amend.
Student-athlete well-being is the driving force. Players from tournament teams sometimes had to play nine days in a row. Conversely, players not on tournament teams routinely had to wait as many as three weeks between the end of the regular season and the start of the individual championships. Withdrawals from the individual draw are common, so on top of reducing injury, the NCAA hopes the move to November will boost player attendance.
Additional qualifying tournaments were added to the fall schedule to compensate for the change, which is where Illinois tennis finds itself just two weeks away from the NCAA Singles and Doubles Tennis Championships.
Four Illini were invited to compete at the ITA Sectional and Masters Championships. From the men’s team, redshirt junior Wiliam Mroz will be in Fort Worth, Texas, for the Central Sectional. Mroz was just one win shy of a bid to the singles championships earlier this season, falling to No. 1 Michigan State junior Ozan Baris in the Midwest Regional Semifinals. Junior Kenta Miyoshi also lost to Baris in the finals but earned a bid by making the finals.
The women’s team has three total players, representing two chances at qualifying. Rome, Georgia, will see the pairing of senior Megan Heuser and sophomore Alice Xu in the Masters doubles draw. Meanwhile, junior McKenna Schaefbauer will be in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for Sectionals. No Illini advanced far enough at the Midwest Regionals to qualify for NCAA individual championships.
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
For Mroz, Sectionals starts in the round of 32 against Michigan State’s redshirt sophomore Aristotelis Thanos. Thanos is the draw’s No. 4 seed and the nation’s No. 72 singles player. However, Mroz won their most recent meeting, a three-set thriller that came down to Mroz claiming a 7-4 tiebreaker (7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (4)).
All four semifinalists at the men’s sectional will receive bids to NCAAs. There are also two bids that the four losing players in the quarterfinals can compete for in an additional match.
In Michigan, Schaefbauer is competing against 31 other players for six spots at NCAAs. Her first match will be against Iowa sophomore Tereza Dejnozkova on Thursday at 9 a.m. The draw will advance one round on Friday and Saturday, while the semifinals and finals are on Sunday. Similar to the men’s Sectional, all four semifinalists and the two quarterfinal playoff winners will receive bids.
Heuser and Xu are also in a field of 32 squads, but they are competing for just three bids instead of six. Their first match is against juniors Irene Cocero and Laura Wipfli from the New Jersey Institute of Technology at 4:30 p.m. The round of 16 and quarterfinals are on Friday before Saturday and Sunday host the semifinals and finals, respectively.
“We’re super excited that we are given this opportunity to be in a situation where we have another chance to qualify for NCAA,” Heuser said. “We’re trying to not put too much pressure on ourselves and try not to put too much expectation on ourselves.”
@blountco21
