Florida men\u2019s tennis is set to open the ITA Men\u2019s National Team Indoor Championship against the No. 6 Mississippi State Bulldogs Friday night. After the tournament, the Gators launch into SEC play.<\/p>\n
The Gators bounced back against FGCU<\/a> last week, beating the Eagles in a sweep \u2014 but they haven\u2019t looked or played their best against other ranked opponents this season.<\/p>\n The good news for Florida is that one of the thorns in its side \u2014 Florida State \u2014 won\u2019t be competing against this weekend.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for the Gators, their opponents aren\u2019t pushovers, either. Far from it, actually.<\/p>\n Mississippi State is the No. 3 seed in the ITA event. On top of that, it\u2019s No. 6 in the ITA\u2019s national rankings, making it the highest-ranked team Florida\u2019s faced so far. The Bulldogs are still undefeated as well, and it already holds a win against No. 24 Illinois.<\/p>\n As if things couldn\u2019t look worse for the Gators, Mississippi State also has four players ranked in singles \u2014 No. No. 6 Petar Jovanovic, No. 33 Mario Martinez Sarrano, No. 45 Benito Sanchez Martinez and No. 68 Bryan Hernandez Cortes \u2014 and one ranked doubles pair: No. 6 Benito Sanchez Martinez and Petar Jovanovic.<\/p>\n Florida, similarly, has four players ranked in singles \u2014 No. 32 Pablo Perez Ramos, No. 43 Jeremy Jin, No. 50 Henry Jefferson and No. 54 Adhithya Ganesan. It also has a ranked doubles pair, No. 10 Henry Jefferson and Tanapatt Nirundorn.<\/p>\n Now, it doesn\u2019t take a genius to see that the Gators top players are much lower ranked than the Bulldogs. In fact, the Gators top-ranked player doesn\u2019t even come close to the Bulldogs, after all they\u2019re 26 rankings apart.<\/p>\n Yet it isn\u2019t all doom and gloom for Florida. The Gators won the ITA Kickoff Weekend tournament against No. 23 Kentucky and No. 13 Columbia.\u00a0<\/p>\n This weekend, the Gators\u2019 other possible opponents, Clemson or Virginia, are ranked No. 16 and No. 1 by the ITA.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the possibility of playing one of those two teams shouldn\u2019t even be on Florida\u2019s mind. First, it has to beat Mississippi State and prove why it belongs in this tournament, among this level of opponents. Florida is the lowest ranked team outside of unranked UC Santa Barbara. Other possible opponents include Arizona State, Ohio State, SMU and Stanford.<\/p>\n The matches will take place at the SMU host site in Dallas\u00a0 and all teams are guaranteed to play a minimum of three matches during the first three days of the tournament, with consolation matches on Saturday and Sunday.<\/p>\n So the Gators start with Mississippi State. There\u2019s no sugar coating to be done here, not with how the Gators have played this season. Their only hope is to play the best game of their season.<\/p>\n Category: Gator Sports<\/a>, Gators Tennis<\/a>, Tennis<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida men\u2019s tennis is set to open the ITA Men\u2019s National Team Indoor Championship against the No. 6…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,67036,2745,67037,67038,67039],"class_list":{"0":"post-164167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-dallas","9":"tag-dallas-headlines","10":"tag-dallas-news","11":"tag-florid-gators-mens-tennis","12":"tag-florida-gators","13":"tag-ita-mens-national-team-indoor-championship","14":"tag-mississippi-state-tennis","15":"tag-virginia-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}