Tournament Central PageABILENE - With no Southland Conference Championship to attend or NCAA Regional to qualify for, the Abilene Christian men's and women's tennis teams are venturing to Omaha, Neb., this weekend for the inaugural National Invitational Tennis Tournament, which features DI independent New Jersey Institute of Technology and fellow reclassifying NCAA DI programs Nebraska-Omaha and Grand Canyon.
The three-day tournament is scheduled to take place at both the Koch Family Tennis Center and Hanscom Brandeis Indoor Tennis Center.
The ACU men (14-10) will help kick off the tournament with Friday's 4:30 p.m. dual against the host Mavericks. They will then play a Saturday doubleheader vs. New Jersey Institute of Technology (10 a.m.) and Grand Canyon (3 p.m.)
ACU's women's team (17-5) begins competing Saturday at 10 a.m. vs. Nebraska-Omaha and battles Grand Canyon Sunday at 9 a.m.
Both Wildcat squads truly exceeded expectations as first-year members of the Southland Conference as they combined to place seven individuals on an all-conference team and finish among the upper half of the team standings. The ACU men finished second in the league to Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, which went undefeated at 6-0, while the women finished fourth of 13 schools with two of their conference defeats coming by one point.
The Mavericks - members of the Summit League - are at the end of their second year of DI reclassification. This season, the Nebraska-Omaha men's team went 6-15 and 1-4 against the Summit, while its women's team posted an overall record of 7-12 and was 3-3 against its conference.
Grand Canyon - first-year members of the Western Athletic Conference - saw it's men's team finish with the WAC's best record of 10-6, while it's women's team went 11-6 to finish with the conference's third-most wins behind Idaho (17) and Texas-Pan American (13).
NJIT athletics officially gained across-the-board active membership in NCAA DI in 2009, but still competes as an independent. However, it's women's team is an associate member of the America East Conference and will be playing at its conference championship this weekend at Maryland-Baltimore County.
The NJIT men's tennis team went 12-5 this spring and comes into this weekend on a four-match winning streak that includes victories over Drexel, Villanova, Stony Brook and Army. Earlier this year, the Highlanders lost 4-3 to 56th-ranked Buffalo and No. 50 Nebraska, 7-0, in Ithaca, N.Y.
