SAN DIEGO – The San Diego State men's tennis team continues its fall tournament schedule in full throttle this weekend when it travels up the coast for the annual ITA Southwest Regional Championships, Oct. 17-20, at Ralphs-Straus Tennis Center in Malibu, California.
The Aztecs are among a field of 14 teams at the regional event, joining host Pepperdine, Arizona, Arizona State, Cal Poly, Grand Canyon, Hawai'i, Loyola Marymount, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, USC and the University of San Diego.
SDSU will send eight players from its 10-man roster to the tournament, which commences on Thursday at 9 a.m. PT with main draw doubles competition, followed by two rounds of singles play. Doubles and singles action continues through the weekend before culminating with championship finals on Sunday. Links to updated draws as well as live video for select matches will be available on GoAztecs.com.
Three Aztec doubles teams received byes, including the duo of juniors Aaro Pollanen and Ignacio Martinez, the latter of whom earned all-Mountain West honors last year, as well as the pairing of senior David Hough and sophomore Alex Scemanenco, along with the combo of junior Jan Kirchhoff and freshman Daniel Traxler.
In addition, the senior tandem of Fabian Roensdorf and Arnaud Restifo will play the Grand Canyon duo of Laurent Magne and David Weber in the first round on Thursday.
Hough and Scemanenco will face USC's Brandon Holt and Riley Smith in the second round on Thursday at 10 a.m., while Pollanen and Martinez will await the winner of the first-round card pitting Cal Poly's Fernando Fonseca and Alexis Delisle against Loyola Marymount's Lucas Moreno and Ethan Prost. In another second-round engagement, Kirchhoff and Traxler will battle USD's Nico Borter and David Norfeldt, who were also given an opening-round bye.
Kirchhoff, who captured the consolation championship at last year's tournament, earned a first-round bye in singles as well and will battle the victor of the first-round matchup between UC Santa Barbara's Luka Vukmanovic and UC Irvine's Antoine Barthe no earlier than 3 p.m. on Thursday.
In a scheduling twist, three SDSU players will face LMU opponents in their opening singles encounters, including Scemanenco, who will cross paths with Max Kaiser, while Roensdorf entertains Cartier Juan. In addition, Pollanen is scheduled to take on the Lions' Prost.
Two other first-round singles matches will feature Cal Poly adversaries, with Restifo squaring off against Delislie, while freshman Daniel Traxler will engage Fonseca.
Elsewhere, Hough will battle GCU's Magne, while Martinez will lock horns with UC Riverside's Gilbert Chung.
Hough logged a solid 3-1 singles record at the UCSB Fall Classic last weekend in Santa Barbara, while Kirchhoff will be seeing his first action since the ITA All-American Championships earlier this month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he fell in the first round of the pre-qualifying draw.
A total of 12 Division I ITA Regional Championships are scheduled across the country between Oct. 17-29, with a trip to the Oracle ITA National Fall Championships in Newport Beach, California, awaiting the singles and doubles winners of each.