The Wichita State women\u2019s tennis team fell in its first NCAA tournament appearance since 2018 on Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n
A 4-1 loss against No. 25 Southern Methodist at the Headington Family Tennis Center in the Norman Regional concluded a historic season for the Shockers, highlighted by a 19-match win streak, a runner-up finish in the American Conference Championship, three all-conference selections in Theodora Chantava, Xin Tong Wang and Giorgia Roselli, and a conference player of the year-winning season from Wang.<\/p>\n
Wichita State was unable to replicate its 4-2 victory over SMU on Jan. 19.<\/p>\n
First-year head coach Jacob Eddins said the Shockers, even with the season-ending loss, are right where they want to be going forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is where we want to be every year, competing for an American Conference championship and making the NCAA Tournament, whether that\u2019s by winning the conference or getting an at-large bid,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is kind of the vision I had for the program and this group,\u201d Eddins added.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Shockers won their highest number of games since the 2015-16 season and have spent the last 11 weeks within the top 40 teams ranked by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But on Saturday, the previous results weren\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
Anne Knuettel and Vichitraporn Vimuktananda secured the win on doubles court No. 3, 6-3, but Wichita State couldn\u2019t build on the momentum. The No. 46-ranked duo of Wang and Roselli fell on court No. 1, 6-3, before Chantava and Kristina Kudryavtseva dropped a 7-5 decision that gave SMU the doubles point and an early 1-0 lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Starting singles, Kudryavtseva fell 6-4, 6-2, extending the Mustang lead to 2-0. Shortly after, Vimuktananda secured the Shockers\u2019 first point of the match with a 6-4, 6-0 victory, cutting SMU\u2019s lead in half.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chantava, who is the 97th-ranked individual player in the country, fell on court No. 3 after three sets after winning the second, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1, putting SMU back up by two, 3-1.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The final WSU player to fall was Wang on court No. 1, 6-3, 6-4.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Shockers now head home after delivering one of the most successful seasons in recent memory, setting a new standard for the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously a special group,\u201d Eddins said. \u201cThey\u2019re a great foundation of players to build the program around moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Wichita State women\u2019s tennis team fell in its first NCAA tournament appearance since 2018 on Saturday afternoon.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-646012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}