MGCCC tennis teams head to ITA Regional
PERKINSTON – Mississippi Gulf Coast travel to Meridian this week for the ITA Regional Tennis Championships, and Gary Bourgeois has two main goals in mind.
He wants to see where he team stands in comparison to other schools, and he wants to get his players to know each other better.
"It's a ranking tournament that's kind of a barometer of where we stand on a national and regional level," he said. "The players will get ranked regionally from this, and that will feed into the national rankings."
The four-day event starts Wednesday. There will be large brackets for singles and doubles for both the men and the women.
It's a qualifying even for the Small College Championship, which will be played Oct. 15-18 at Sumter, South Carolina. The men's double team of Skyler Flowers and Brandon Lane finished sixth in the event in 2014. In the women's event in 2015, Christa Owen finished sixth in singles, and she teamed with Kit Chowdhary to finish eighth in doubles.
Freshman Paulina Estrada is seeded No. 1 in singles in Meridian, and she'll play as the No. 1 seed in doubles with Katie Robinson.
Sam Blackburn, who was named ITA Region III Player to Watch last season, leads the men's team. He returns from a men's team that finished MACJC regular-season play undefeated and finished 12th at the NJCAA Tournament, the best in the state.
"The men and women have a lot of potential, but you never know what the other teams have," Bourgeois said.
Bourgeois said he'll also swap up the teams' rooming assignments on the trip.
"I use this as a bonding kind of thing, building team chemistry," he said. "A lot of these people don't know each other really well, yet. You go away for four days, you pretty much know everybody when you get back."