Coach Shields wants to prove he can take a D1 program to elite status following a successful stint at mid major Boise State. Kudos to him!Arizona won their first ever pac -12 title of regular season. How did they recruit these good players in such short amount of time ??
The Pacific 10 Alliance!
- Thread starter db379
- Start date
TBH I don’t think the Cardinal have a shot considering Ma is totally gassed, and Houghton and Choy are hit or miss. Only Yepifanova is playing consistently well at this pointCal bears women win their pac-12 title. Congrats. But i think come NCAA tournament time, the Cardinal has to be favored over them from historical records
Clemson_tennis
Legend
Utah with their second ever trip to the NCAA tournament second round after beating Ole Miss today.
Huge validation for a Pac 12 school against an SEC opponent
lol, ole miss was a nobody in the sec this year, 4-8 in conference and lost in the rd of 16 of the sec tournament a couple weeks ago
this was the equivalent of Utah beating Vanderbilt in football - doesn’t say anything about the strength of the top half of the SEC
optic yellow
Legend
Isn't the Pac-12 supposed to be better than the SEC at tennis?
optic yellow
Legend
Sounds like they learned a thing or two from the scheduling of their conferences' football teams
Sounds like they learned a thing or two from the scheduling of their conferences' football teams
Sounds to me like they had no business being in the NCAA tournament
selection committee must think quality of tennis outside the SEC and Big12 is hot garbage to be letting a conference bottom-feeder like them in
optic yellow
Legend
I certainly was not disagreeing with that point.
Ole Miss is ranked 32. The Utes are a middling Pac12 program. Iirc they lost to USC, Arizona and Stanford 4-0 in the Pac12 regular season. I didn’t say they beat the cream of the SEC nor should they be expected to. But considering how all the talk is about the quality of the SEC, it is a big win.
Nostradamus
Bionic Poster
SEC has nothing. Pac 12 is the strongest division in the country, possibly on the planet
Utah was the #4 team in the pac12 standings
Men's Tennis Standings
Ole miss was the #10 team in the SEC
http://a.espncdn.com/sec/media/2022/Men's%20Standings%20Page.pdf
Championships - Men's Tennis - Southeastern Conference
Championships - Men's Tennis
www.secsports.com
I get it, the SEC, Big12, and ACC (x4) have all won titles since the last time the Pac12 won on the men’s side in 2014 - but just stop being desperate and looking at a win over the #10 team in a conference as a reason to celebrate the Pac12 - let’s see who’s around in the quarterfinals
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I am not being desperate nor do I think any of the Pac12 will be in the quarterfinals. A win for a team that lost badly to the top three Pac12 teams even against one of the lower tier SEC teams is noteworthy. I don’t understand why you have to twist everything around to this being a Pac12 vs SEC thing. Nothing wrong with acknowledging a good win which is what I was doing. Btw, I am not a rabid Pac12 fan and have stated elsewhere that I think it’s the weakest of the Power 5 conferencesUtah was the #4 team in the pac12 standings
Men's Tennis Standings
pac-12.com
Ole miss was the #10 team in the SEC
http://a.espncdn.com/sec/media/2022/Men's%20Standings%20Page.pdf
Championships - Men's Tennis - Southeastern Conference
Championships - Men's Tennis
I get it, the SEC, Big12, and ACC (x4) have all won titles since the last time the Pac12 won on the men’s side in 2014 - but just stop being desperate and looking at a win over the #10 team in a conference as a reason to celebrate the Pac12 - let’s see who’s around in the quarterfinals
jcgatennismom
Hall of Fame
Why has the PAC-12 gone down in level in the last decade? You would think the Cal teams would have the edge in recruiting-year-round outdoor tennis without the humidity of Florida. In USTA juniors, the So Cal region was usually viewed as the strongest. Or is the issue that major college tourneys are played either indoors or in May humidity-conditions that differ from the usual Cal climate? Is the PAC-12 still suffering from playing less than the SEC and Big 12 did over the pandemic? Only the SEC and Big12 had official ITA matches in fall of 2020, and unlike Big10 and PaC12 they played a robust spring 21 schedule. It's a year later but I still think some of the P5s have not regained lost ground-particularly UCLA and Illinois who didnt even make NCAA cut. Some of the Big10 are back to prepandemic level, e.g. OSU and Michigan (OMG from ITA 49 in 21 to ITA 5) but the PAC12 has no top 10 teams though another reason is some PAC teams are young.
IMHO, the better recruits with a few exceptions aren’t headed to the Pac12. Take for instance two excellent juniors from SoCal, Quinn and Michelsen. Both have committed to UGA when they could have stayed local. It will be interesting to see where two other standouts in the Class of 23, Kang and Tien, also from SoCal, commit. You are right SoCal is stacked with elite juniors but they are opting for the SEC. Even a few years ago, Brooksby and Nakashima chose other conferences over the Pac12
Some of us remember almost all of the top California juniors choosing Stanford, USC and UCLA not too long ago.
I do too…Boyer, Dostanic, Smith, Nanda, Sah etc. But that seems to be changing perhaps because today’s kids believe the SEC’s the place to be?
just characterizing where these two teams were in their respective conferences accurately - if you think the 4th best team in the Pac12 beating the 10th best team in the SEC is noteworthy and ‘huge validation’ as said in the original post, ok
If the #4 SEC team beats the #10 PAC-12 team, no one will post that the win was a huge validation for the SEC.
men's final 16 by conference:
ACC - UVA, WFU, UNC, NCSU, FSU
SEC - UF, Tenn, UK, SC
Big12 - TCU, Baylor, Texas
Pac12 - USC, Stanford
Big10 - OSU, Michigan
good stuff from the ACC (*cough* fire Ramsey Smith *cough*)
i could've told you the two weakest men's tennis conferences before today, but always nice to have objective confirmation
(also the two conferences that haven't hoisted a team NCAA championship trophy in recent years)
ACC - UVA, WFU, UNC, NCSU, FSU
SEC - UF, Tenn, UK, SC
Big12 - TCU, Baylor, Texas
Pac12 - USC, Stanford
Big10 - OSU, Michigan
good stuff from the ACC (*cough* fire Ramsey Smith *cough*)
i could've told you the two weakest men's tennis conferences before today, but always nice to have objective confirmation
(also the two conferences that haven't hoisted a team NCAA championship trophy in recent years)
When talking about the Pac-12 historically you're really at most only talking about the Pac-6--UCLA, USC, Stanford, and to a slightly lesser extent Cal, and to an even lesser degree Washington and Arizona (until this year). And there are actually only 9 Pac-12 schools that have men's tennis teams. USC has not been as strong since coach Peter Smith left (why he did is still a mystery to me) and a couple years ago UCLA assistant coach Grant Chen took the head coaching job at SMU--Chen was an intracule part of the recruiting process at UCLA. And Cal had a mid-year coaching change too. Plus I do think the Pac-12 has not fully recovered from the pandemic, there was a lot confusion in the conference about what was going on and whether they would have a season during that time which hurt the conference as a whole, not just in tennis. And of course Stanford tends to underachieve no matter what despite strong recruiting years. Plus there are some pretty strong California schools that are not part of the Pac-12 (Pepperdine, U of San Diego, UC Irvine) that have been able to attract a player or 2 each who might otherwise have gone to a Pac-12 school. This year Arizona had a good year finishing atop the Pac-12 after the regular season and were seeded #1 at the conference championships but looked terrible in a loss to #8 seed Washington--almost like they didn't really believe they were the best. But to me the Pac-12 has for a long time pretty much just been the Pac-4 (UCLA, USC, Stanford, Cal)--it would be good to someday see a non-California school do something to change the status quo.
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collegetennisisthebest
Semi-Pro
Ole Miss looks like they quit on their coach
Ole Miss beat NC State in late January to qualify for the team indoors
they stopped playing hard....about midway thru the season
several SEC teams need new coaches (ahem....Alabama, Arkansas, Vandy, Ole Miss)
Nostradamus
Bionic Poster
I was very impressed by the coaching staff at Harvard. to be ranked top 16 in the country and have the record they have with the players they have take some solid coaching. Although they may have choked a bit indoors, Cardinal was very much in form and playing great tennis including the best doubles play all season long. So it wasn't as much of upset as it looked. Max Basing is Rafa Nadal academy product with international pro tennis experience so we expected him to come thru in that deciding match.
Harvard’s been getting better recruits. Mid/lower blue chips and solid high five stars with a few accomplished international recruits thrown in. In fact the Ivies broadly have been recruiting better players but these kids have to make the cut to be accepted academically and then stay the course. So they can only go so far as a tennis program. They also lose out to Stanford because it can offer scholarships whereas the Ivies can’t. However, interestingly the Ivies often out-recruit Duke which is a scholarship program and academically just a notch lower (probably at the same level as the lower Ivies like Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth)
Collegetennisrules
Rookie
Didn't Basing commit to an Ivy League School?
Nostradamus
Bionic Poster
Yes but he went to even better school now with Stanford which is leagues above Ivy
here to say something positive about the Pac12 for once!
Giron just took down Schwartzman in front of an epic crowd on the Rome court that's cut into the ground like an amphitheater, 6-1,7-6
he had a rowdy group of young men in the front row behind one of the baselines supporting him, which made his big win leading to a career high live ranking of #49 all the more fun
hit a passing shot to go up 6-4 in the TB and turned to scream 'forza!' at his group of supporters
then took a lap high-fiving the crowd after the match
good for him, seems a very likeable guy
Giron just took down Schwartzman in front of an epic crowd on the Rome court that's cut into the ground like an amphitheater, 6-1,7-6
he had a rowdy group of young men in the front row behind one of the baselines supporting him, which made his big win leading to a career high live ranking of #49 all the more fun
hit a passing shot to go up 6-4 in the TB and turned to scream 'forza!' at his group of supporters
then took a lap high-fiving the crowd after the match
good for him, seems a very likeable guy
collegetennisisthebest
Semi-Pro
St. Marys and San Francisco......and pickleball practices....will prepare them for their usual round of 32 NCAA exitwho will Standford play against?
Point 1: The Pac12 has gone down in a lot of sports--not just tennis.
Point 2: All of this conference realignment has gotten stupid and absurd. It's all of course driven by greed and the fear of individual schools and conferences of not getting as much TV-rights money has other schools and conferences. It's ruined college athletics, IMO. Regionall conferences, regional rivalries, were fun--lots of tradition. Now we're headed to 4 major conferences with, what, 30 member schools each, which is stupid.
Point 2: All of this conference realignment has gotten stupid and absurd. It's all of course driven by greed and the fear of individual schools and conferences of not getting as much TV-rights money has other schools and conferences. It's ruined college athletics, IMO. Regionall conferences, regional rivalries, were fun--lots of tradition. Now we're headed to 4 major conferences with, what, 30 member schools each, which is stupid.
Clemson_tennis
Legend
UCLA men’s tennis has definitely fallen quite a bit. TCU treated them like UC Irvine or something today.
optic yellow
Legend
UC Irvine should have a good men's tennis team if we're being real though
Interesting women's matches lately. UCLA upset #5 Ohio State 4-3. USC almost upset Pepperdine by taking the doubles point and almost splitting the singles. When USC, UCLA and Stanford play among themselves it will be interesting.
I wonder if Ohio State women are following the men's pattern of riding high in the indoor season and then cooling off somewhat in the outdoor season. We will find out more when they play Pepperdine this afternoon.
I wonder if Ohio State women are following the men's pattern of riding high in the indoor season and then cooling off somewhat in the outdoor season. We will find out more when they play Pepperdine this afternoon.
Clemson_tennis
Legend
Looks like Arizona def Cal 4-3 in an epic one that lasted about 4 hours and 20 minutes.
Nostradamus
Bionic Poster
is USC still any good ? now that Cardinal has become the best of the best, not sure if rest of this Pac 12 matches coming up will provide them any challenges ?
optic yellow
Legend
Not a PAC school, **** them.
On the women's schedule, Saturday/Sunday March 25/26 is the big weekend, with Stanford and Cal traveling to USC and UCLA. This weekend will sort out the top of the PAC-12, with only a couple of other teams challenging those four for prominence.
The very next weekend, Stanford and Cal travel to Arizona/Arizona State.
The very next weekend, Stanford and Cal travel to Arizona/Arizona State.
USC got smoked 7-0 by TCU. Tien still missing from the lineup but probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had played. TCU was obviously pissed at their 4-1 loss to Texas. Dostanic lost in straights getting bagled in the second set. Sad reflection on the Pac 12 with their best team blown out. That should end their national title contender aspirations. Also they need Tien ASAP
optic yellow
Legend
USC is a Big Ten school
Not yet
optic yellow
Legend
In my mind they are, **** them.
Golden_state_of_mind
Rookie
Utah has surprised me very much this year
Clemson_tennis
Legend
Looks like USC is hinting that Learner Tien will be playing today. Joining the team in time for a tournament run.
An exciting wrinkle to this season for sure
Clemson_tennis
Legend
Utah wins a dramatic one over Arizona 4-3. Clinched with third set breaker wins at 1 and 6.
Larry Duff
Legend
San Diego State to start dominating should they choose this conference.
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