This past weekend, we sent three teams up to compete in the annual UC Irvine Tournament. It was a great opportunity for our players to have some match experiences in preparation of sectionals. Fortunately, we were able to send three teams and we brought around 25 players to participate in the tournament.

Day 1 January 19

The first day of the tournament is pool play for all teams. Our A-team competed at the UC Irvine campus against Cal Poly Pomona, UCSB-B, and Cal Poly Slo-B. A-team was able to finish the first in the group with scores of 25-24, 30-6, and 30-12. On the other hand, B-team and C-team played at Great Park Tennis Complex. B-team has UCI-C, Pepperdine, and Cal Poly-A in their pool. They were able to shut down UCI-C team with a 30-14 overall score, and fell short against Pepperdine and Slo-A with scores 17-27 and 12-29. C-team, despite having only three girls on the team, stomped Cal Poly Pomona B team with a score of 30-11. They then had a very close match against Cal State Fullerton and lost 23-25 in the overtime. Their final match was against UCLA A team, and they lost the match 3-30.

Day 2 January 20

The second day of the tournament is bracket play, in which the top 2 teams from each pool competed in the gold bracket, and the rest competed in the silver bracket. A-team started the day with a match against UC Riverside’s A-team. They had an easy match and won the match without dropping a set. In the quarterfinals of the gold bracket, A-team played UCLA’s B team. Men’s doubles stunned their opponents where they won the set without dropping a game, while women’s doubles lost in a very close match 4-6. Both singles players got subbed out from their matches, but they lost their sets 2-6, 5-6 respectively. Down 1 game going into mixed, Alex Miaule and Mina Vukovic lost in a very close match 5-6. B-team and C-team played very well in their brackets and reached the semifinals of the bracket. B-team beat UCI’s B team 23-18, while C-team beat UCR’s C team 30-13. In their final matches of the tournament, B team lost to USC’s B team 9-30, and C team lost to UCSB’s B team 13-29.

Overall, it was a great bonding experience for all our newcomers and returners to play a tournament together. The tritons are hoping to come back even stronger in sectionals.

 

A-team: Qing Wen, Mina Vukovic, Smita Sabada, Jessica Chen, Sanjeev Sinha, Kailash Venkatraman, Gabe Pizzolato, Michael White, Alex Miaul

B-team: Karoline Pintar, Anthea Leng, Katya Skurikhin, Tiffany Zhang, Alan Williams, Jeff Mah, Joe Altaffer, Seth Kim, Darren Ly

C-team: Ellie Contreras, Hong Ly, Kenna Bayless, Anton Preis, Kei Takiya, Kshitij Gaur, Thomas Qin, Vincent You