The weekend of November 10th through the 11th, the UCSD club tennis team went to go play our first tournament at the Seal Beach Tennis Center. Every year, we let our new players participate in the first tournament of the year, so they have an opportunity to see how club tennis tournaments work. We sent two teams to Seal Beach this year, and they played teams all through Southern California such as Cal Poly Pomona, UCLA, UC Riverside, and many more. Our A team ended up going to the gold bracket of the tournament, and our B team was in the silver bracket. In the gold bracket, our A team ended up beating UC Riverside in the first round but fell short in the semi-finals against UCLA. Many of the matches had spectators on the edges of their seats, and overall it was a good match-up to watch. Our B-team played Cal Poly Pomona in their first round of the silver bracket, but eventually fell a little short of games after playing their mixed match. Nonetheless, it was a very close match between the two teams, and all the players fought through the smoggy skies and the dirty air. They played UCSB next, and the B-team made a very outstanding comeback. They were down by 8 games after they won their mixed doubles match and to have a shot at winning the match, they had to win 8 more games in a row. Game after game, our team kept winning and the reality of winning the match got closer. Eventually they made the game count equal to UCSB’s and had to play a tiebreaker! It ended up going to a sudden death point, meaning the team who would win the point would win it all. Our mixed team clutched the point, and they finished off the amazing comeback!

The event went very well, as a lot of our new players got a lot of playing time and got a lot of exposure on which teams they did and didn’t do well against. This was the first weekend everyone spent together, and it was very nice for the newcomers as they all got to know each other better, along with the veterans of the club. All the players had a great first experience representing UCSD club tennis, and our team cannot wait to see how much better we do together in future tournaments!