Day of Upsets in Tulsa; Di Lorenzo and Shibahara Will Meet in Women’s Final

Chrysochos will now meet Florida sophomore Alfredo Perez after Perez won a pair of three-setters on Saturday. Perez opened up the day against Texas freshman Yuya Ito in a match that had one close set then a pair of lopsided ones. Perez led 4-1 in the first set but Ito came back to force a tiebreak. Ito went up an early mini-break and had a pair of set points at *6-4 but Perez won the final four points to take the tiebreak 8-6. Ito rebounded in the second set taking it 6-1 but Perez righted the ship in the third set and rolled 6-0 in less than 20 minutes.

Perez’s quarterfinal match against Georgia Tech junior Christopher Eubanks followed a similar path though it had a much closer third set. Perez broke Eubanks to start the match and made the break lead hold up in route to a 6-4 opening set. Eubanks rolled 6-1 in the second but Perez got the key break in the third when he broke Eubanks’s 5-5 service game and then served it out for a 6-4, 1-6, 7-5 win.

Texas freshman Christian Sigsgaard continued his remarkable run in Tulsa by winning his 10th and 11th matches in the last eight days. Sigsgaard knocked off Baylor senior Max Tchoutakian 6-3, 6-2 in his morning Round of 16 match and then in the early afternoon he faced Cal senior Florian Lakat.

Just a few hours earlier Lakat had knocked off the defending champion and No. 2 seed Thai-Son Kwiatkowski in a surprising 2-6, 6-2, 6-0 scoreline but Lakat wouldn’t be able to replicate the result against Sigsgaard. The Texas freshman jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first set and held on the no-ad point to take the opening set 6-3. Lakat led 5-4 in the second set but Sigsgaard held, broke, and held again to close out a 6-3, 7-5 win.

Sigsgaard will now meet Ohio State sophomore Hugo Di Feo after the Buckeye won a pair of tough three-setters against the No. 4 and No. 5 seeds.

Di Feo opened up the day by taking an early 4-2 lead against Wake Forest junior Skander Mansouri but the Demon Deacon would take four straight games to claim the opening set 6-4. Di Feo went up an early break in the second set but Mansouri broke back and took a 5-4 lead. Di Feo managed to hold, break, and hold to take the second set 7-5 and then he made it six games in a row by opening up a double break 3-0 lead in the third. Mansouri erased both breaks and won four straight games to take a 4-3 lead but Di Feo hung in there and broke back to go up 6-5. Di Feo managed to serve it out to move on to a meeting with the No. 4 seed Tom Fawcett.

Fawcett himself had a tough Round of 16 match that ended with the Stanford junior fighting off a match point to defeat Arkansas senior Michael Redlicki 7-5 in the third. Fawcett looked like he was going to tear through Di Feo in straight sets after leading 7-5, 4-1* but Di Feo won the last five games of the second set to force a third. Fawcett quickly went up a 3-0* in the third but Di Feo won the last six games to stun Fawcett 5-7, 6-4, 6-3.

Since FloTennis is only streaming four courts it would have been logical to think that each of the quarterfinal matches would have ended up on a streaming court but that wasn’t the case on Saturday. There were more than enough courts to accommodate all the back draw matches, in fact there were several courts not in use, but for some reason two back draw matches ended up on courts 2 and 4 which meant that unless you were onsite you weren’t able to see the Di Feo/Fawcett and Chrysochos/Torpegaard matches. Of course the obvious remedy was to turn on Tulsa’s streaming feed on courts 5 through 12, and that was supposed to happen, but I was told there were technical issues that prevented it from happening.

Men’s Round of 16