Jan. 31, 2008
ATLANTA – Georgia Tech’s top-ranked women’s tennis team will face its toughest test of the young 2008 season this weekend when it hosts No. 7 Northwestern Saturday at 5 p.m. at the Bill Moore Tennis Center. The match, which will be played indoors, will be both teams’ final tune-up prior to the ITA National Team Indoor Championships, which begin next week.
Saturday’s matchup will be the first between a pair of top-10 teams in 2008, and both squads enter the weekend with 2-0 records this season. Between the two teams there are seven singles players ranked in the top-25, five of which stand in the top-10, in addition to two doubles tandems that appear in the top-10 in the latest individual rankings.
“We have a lot of respect for Northwestern’s program, and it starts at the top with their coach,” said head coach Bryan Shelton. “She does a great job of preparing and developing players.
“We gain a lot from playing a team of this caliber so early in the season. We can most certainly use them as a measuring stick for where we’re at and what things we need to keep working on moving forward.”
The last two regular-season meetings have gone down to the wire, with each school pulling out 4-3 victories on the opposing team’s home court. The Jackets knocked off Northwestern a year ago in the last meeting between the two schools after the Wildcats had won the first three matchups.
The first match between the two programs resulted in a 5-0 victory for the Wildcats, and there was a 12-year break before Northwestern traveled back to Atlanta to pull out a 4-3 win on March 4, 2006. That loss was Tech’s last at the Bill Moore Tennis Center, as the Yellow Jackets have won 19-straight home matches since then.
Free Georgia Tech drawstring bags will be available for the first 100 fans in attendance, while fans can also serve for a Papa John’s Pizza between doubles and singles play.
