{"id":199240,"date":"2025-10-03T10:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T10:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/199240\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T10:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T10:03:09","slug":"arizonas-jay-friend-wins-ita-all-american-championship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/199240\/","title":{"rendered":"Arizona\u2019s Jay Friend wins ITA All-American championship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">For the first time in program history, Arizona men\u2019s tennis has a national champion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Senior Jay Friend won the ITA Men\u2019s All-American singles championship on Sunday in Tulsa, Okla., defeating Ohio State\u2019s Aidan Kim in a matchup of two of the top players in college tennis.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Friend, the No. 5 ranked player nationally, defeated No. 7 Ozan Baris of Michigan State, No. 9 Dylan Dietrich of Virginia, and No. 4 Kim to take the crown.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">\u201cWhat Jay just accomplished is the pinnacle of college tennis \u2014 winning the All-American Championship, one of the most prestigious national titles in our sport,\u201d Arizona coach Clancy Shields said. \u201cHe capped off the event beating 3 top 10 opponents and became the first national champion in Arizona program history. I couldn\u2019t be more proud of Jay, his process throughout the 8 day event, and the quality of his play the last couple days.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Friend defeated Kim with a convincing 6-2, 6-4 result Sunday, a day after beating Dietrich in a three-set tiebreaker.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Friend will represent Arizona at the NCAA Individual Championships Nov. 19\u201324 in Orlando, Fla.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">The Tokyo native is coming a stellar summer in which he won three gold medals at the FISU World University Games.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">By earning the ITA championship, Friend joins an illustrious group of past ITA winning including John Isner and Ben Shelton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time in program history, Arizona men\u2019s tennis has a national champion. Senior Jay Friend won&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[114935,99,428],"class_list":["post-199240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-arizona-wildcats-the-other-sports","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}