Jack Kramer Classic, Lakewood Ranch Dickie V, Bulldog Scramble, Georgia Signs Ponwith

The Jack Kramer Tennis Club in Rolling Hills Estates, California will host the Jack Kramer Classic with 12 mainly west coast teams sending players to compete. Those 12 schools are USC, UCLA, Stanford, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Cal Poly, Loyola Marymount, UC Santa Barbara, Pepperdine UC Irvine, and SMU.  The tournament site is here and it has a list of competitors with draws likely to be released on Thursday. Some of the bigger names competing are UCLA’s Gage Brymer, USC’s Robbie Bellamy and Jack DeVine, Arizona’s Naoki Takeda, Washington’s Jake Douglas and Enzo Sommer, Oregon’s Daan Maasland, Pepperdine’s Stefan Menichella, SMU’s Samm Butler and Hunter Johnson. 

Men’ Singles Seeds:
1. Naoki Takeda (Arizona)
2. Daan Maasland (Oregon)
3. Samm Butler (SMU)
4. Sameer Kumar (Stanford)
5. Nate Lammons (SMU)
6. Stefan Menichella (Pepperdine)
7. Jake Douglas (Washington)
8. Enzo Sommer (Washington)

The Lakewood Ranch Country Club in Lakewood Ranch, Florida (outside of Tampa) hosts the Dick Vitale Lakewood Ranch Intercollegiate Clay Court Classic.  Play begins on Friday with first and second round men’s and women’s singles action and concludes on Sunday with the finals. The tournament’s Facebook page will have updates throughout the weekend and scores will be posted here. 

Players from these men’s teams will be participating: Arizona, College of Charleston, Florida Gulf Coast, Furman, Miami, Michigan, Minnesota, Navy, North Florida, Princeton, and South Florida.  

Players from these women’s teams will be participating: East Tennessee State, Florida, Florida Gulf Coast, Memphis, Notre Dame, Oklahoma State, Princeton, South Florida, Tennessee, and TCU will participate on the women’s side.

Men’s Singles Seeds:
1. Tom Colautti (Princeton)
2. Christian Langmo (Miami)
3. Max Andrews (Miami)
4. Ruben Weber (Minnesota)

Women’s Singles Seeds:
1. Brianna Morgan (Florida)
2. Vladica Babic (Oklahoma State)
3. Anna Danilina (Florida)
4. Spencer Liang (Florida)

Alabama is hosting the CCB Collegiate Invitational in Birmingham with guys participating from Alabama, Louisville, LSU, Middle Tennessee State, Samford, South Alabama, Southern Miss, Texas, Troy, Tulane, and UAB.  They’ll be both singles and doubles draws with play getting started on Friday with 2 rounds of doubles and 1 of singles. See draws below:

The University of Georgia is hosting the Bulldog Scramble this weekend with guys from Georgia, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Notre Dame, South Carolina and Oklahoma competing in the 3 day round robin event. 

Schedule participants:

Georgia:  Wayne Montgomery, Walker Duncan, Paul Oosterbaan, Nick Wood, Andy Martinez, Emil Reinberg.  

Harvard: Sebastian Beltrame, Xavier Gonzalez, Conor Haughey, Kelvin Lam, Chris Morrow, Grant Solomon, Kenny Tao, Brian Yeung, Andy Zhou.

Georgia Tech: Michael Kay, Carlos Benito, Andrew Li, Casey Kay, Elijah Melendez, Daniel Yun

Oklahoma: Austin Siegel, John Milstead
South Carolina: Alex Fennell, Sam Swank

Notre Dame: TBD

Today was the first day of the early signing period and Georgia did very well as it landed Scottsdale, Arizona’s Nathan Ponwith (UTR 13.82) who is the current #1 recruit for the class of 2016 per TennisRecruiting.Net. In addition to Ponwith, Manny Diaz also signed Hilton Head’s Robert Loeb (TRN #11/UTR 13.72) and Peachtree City’s Alex Phillips (TRN #17/UTR 13.22).

Here are some other early signings/committments per TRN:
Zeke Clark (TRN #3/UTR 14.14) to Illinois – TRN article courtesy of Colette Lewis
Hady Habib (TRN #4/UTR 13.55) to Texas A&M – TRN article courtesy of James Hill
Brandon Holt (TRN #5/UTR 14.39) to USC
Nick Stachowiak (TRN #6/UTR 13.65) to Duke
Robert Levine (TRN #7/UTR 13.47) to Duke
William Genesen (TRN #10/UTR 13.48) to Stanford

TCU got another solid pick-up yesterday when David Roditi announced that Eduardo Nava (UTR 14.03) had signed and would be on campus in January for the upcoming season. Also joining Nava in January will be Alex Rybakov (UTR 14.47) who was the #1 recruit in the class of 2015. When the preseason rankings come out in January there’s no way that TCU isn’t going to be in the top 5 and I’d be really surprised if they were lower than 3. They’ll have a top 6 of Cameron Norrie, Guillermo Nunez, Alex Rybakov, Jerry Lopez, Eduardo Nava, and Trevor Johnson/Reese Stalder with others on the bench.