MCC Tennis to host Oracle/ITA Southern JUCO Championships

From School Reports

Meridian Community College is set to host the Oracle/ITA Southern JUCO Regional Championships at Northeast Tennis Center in Meridian, MS beginning Wednesday, September 21 with the men's Round of 64 single's action beginning at 4:00 p.m. The women will begin play at 5:30 in the round of 64. The tournament is set to pit some of the top players from the US, Columbia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and across the globe.

The men's bracket has forty-four players from seven different junior colleges entered, while the women will have thirty-eight singles players from six different colleges. On the men's side players from Copiah Lincoln CC, East Central CC, Hinds CC, Itawamba CC, Marion Military Institute, Meridian CC, and Mississippi Gulf Coast CC bring some stiff competition to vie for an opportunity to qualify for the Oracle/ITA Cup (formerly known as the National Small College Championships), which will be played in Surprise, AZ, October 13-16, 2016, at the Surprise Tennis and Racquet Center.

Meridian and Gulf Coast bring the largest squads with ten singles players each. Jason Pimenta, who won the singles title last year will have to work very hard to repeat. Jason comes off a stellar freshman season going undefeated in Region XXIII and finishing #19 in the ITA rankings in May. Marion Military's Daniel Boussom is the number one seed after taking a win off Pimenta last week. All of the teams have top players with a good UTR ranking, so it will be very competitive.

The women's side appears to be one of the strongest draws yet with all of the same teams with the exclusion of Itawamba hoping to qualify a singles and doubles team for the Oracle/ITA Cup. Mariana Alvarez, who is from Columbia and plays one singles for Hinds Community College is the one seed. She finished last season ranked 15th in the National ITA Rankings. She will have tough competition from MMI's Paola Bou and Gulf Coast's Paulina Estrada who was last year's winner of this tournament. Play begins Thursday at 8:00 a.m. with men's singles and will continue into Thursday night as two rounds of singles and two rounds of doubles will be played. The players will return to the courts on Friday at 9:00 a.m. with singles play followed by doubles in the afternoon.

The finals will be Saturday morning. Doubles play is an eight-game pro set until the finals, while singles play is two out of three sets with a match tiebreak in the third until the finals.