Oct. 19, 2016
2016 ITA Southwest Regional Championships Draws
SAN DIEGO -- The San Diego State men's tennis team will compete in the final collective tournament of its fall schedule this weekend when it heads up the coast for the ITA Southwest Regional Championships presented by Oracle, Oct. 20-24, in Malibu, Calif.
The tournament commences Thursday with one round of doubles competition and two rounds of singles play, while Friday's action features one round each of doubles main and consolation draws to go along with one singles main bracket and two consolation draws. The event continues Saturday and Sunday before culminating with championship and consolation finals in both doubles and singles on Monday.
A total of eight Aztecs will take to the courts at the Ralphs-Straus Tennis Center and Crest Tennis Courts on the campus of Pepperdine University, including senior Marko Goles-Babic (Zagreb, Croatia), who received a first-round bye in the open singles draw and will square off in the round of 64 against the winner of the match between Cal Poly's Karl Enander and Max Kaiser of Loyola Marymount.
In other first-round singles action, SDSU senior Milen Ianakiev (Elz, Hesse, Germany) will battle Cal Poly's Axel Damien, while junior Santiago Cevallos (Queretaro, Mexico) tangles with Igor Kolaric of Hawai'i. In addition, sophomore Sander Gjoels-Andersen (Klampenborg, Denmark) will lock horns with Moritz Geis of UC Irvine, while fellow classmate Raul de la Torre (Calexico, Calif.) is set to engage Pepperdine's Nicholas Baez in his tournament opener. The Torrey Pines High alumnus is coming off a stellar performance at the Aztec Fall Invitational earlier this month where he captured the Flight 2 singles crown.
Three SDSU freshmen will also make their initial regional appearances this weekend, including Joel Popov (Tampere, Finland), who will take on LMU's Charles Boyce in the singles round of 128. Elsewhere, Nicholas Mitchell (Ojai, Calif.) awaits a clash with Nishanth Yamani of UCLA, while David Hough (Traralgorn, Victoria, Australia) matches up with Grand Canyon's Lorenzo Fucile.
In doubles competition, the Aztec tandem of Goles-Babic and Ianakiev received a No. 8 seed, while the duo of Gjoels-Andersen and Cevallos earned a first-round bye as well. Other Scarlet and Black pairings include Hough-de la Torre and Popov-Mitchell.
Along with SDSU, 11 additional schools will be represented at the ITA Southwest Regional including the University of San Diego, UC Irvine, UCLA, USC, UC Santa Barbara, LMU, Pepperdine, Cal Poly, Hawai'i, Arizona and Grand Canyon.
The ITA Regional Championships feature some of the top men's and women's players across the nation. Over 8,000 student-athletes from NCAA Division I, II, III, NAIA, junior and community colleges compete across 85 ITA Regional Championships around the country. Regional winners will gain automatic entry into the ITA National Indoor Intercollegiate Championships, Nov. 3-6, at the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center (home of the U.S. Open) in Flushing, N.Y.