Sept. 11, 2014
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.- The Penn State women's tennis team opens their 2014 fall slate on Friday with two tournaments. Five players will travel to Midland, Texas for the Racquet Club Collegiate Invitational while eight others will head to Philadelphia, Pa. for the Cissie Leary Invitational. The 18th Annual Cissie Leary Invitational begins Friday, September 12 and carries through Sunday, September 14 and is being played at the Hamlin Tennis Center. The teams participating at this event include: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Maryland, Old Dominion, Richmond, St. John's, Temple, and the hosts, Penn. The tournament will consist of two singles flights (A&B) as well as one doubles flight. Each flight will contain 32 pairings. The doubles flight plays first at 8:00 a.m. with the singles first round and round of 16 beginning at 9:30 a.m.
The players that will be participating for Penn State at the Cissie Leary Invitational include: Samantha Tutelman (New York, N.Y.), Taylor Shukow (Boca Raton, Fla.), Kelly Mengel (Pittsburgh, Pa.), Liyin Xu (Chengdu, China), Lisa Petruzillo (Muttontown, N.Y.), Emily Rivers (Washington, D.C.), Melissa Minniti (Gaithersburg, Md.), and Hannah Kratky (Greenwich, Conn.).
In August, the Intercollegiate Tennis Association created a new Division I dual meet format that will be used this weekend. For more information on the format, please click here.
The Racquet Club Collegiate Invitational is also beginning on September 12 and carrying through to September 14. There will be 19 teams competing for the chance to leave as champions, including: Pepperdine, Wichita State, Texas State, Nebraska, Rice, New Mexico, Texas, Tulsa, Abilene Christian, Lamar, University of Texas-Arlington, Texas Tech, TCU, North Texas, Texas A&M, Kansas, Baylor, and SMU.
Dasha Sapagova (Belarus, Minsk) takes on Anastasiya Shestakova of UNT in the first round while Devan McCluskey (Phoenix, Ariz.) plays Elizabeth Thoms of UTA. Fourth seeded Victoria Kisialeva (Toronto, Canada) will make her Penn State singles debut against Shannon Beckett of Texas State while Katia Blik (Moscow, Russia) competes against Marcela Cichon of Tulsa. Kim Surin (Montreal, Canada) battles against Franziska Sprinkle of North Texas in a separate singles bracket. For the doubles portion, the sixth seeded team of Kisialeva and Kim Surin will take on the team of Bhat and Oliver from New Mexico. Also competing in doubles is the team of Blik and Sapogova, who will compete against Pieratt and Gutierrez from Texas State. This is the first time that the combination of Kisialeva and Surin will play together in a tournament since transferring in from Baylor and Arkansas, respectively. Their combined collegiate doubles record is 87-47.
Following the three-day tournament, the Nittany Lions are back in action at the Bulldog Invitational October3-5 in New Haven, Conn. Follow Penn State on Facebook at Penn State Women's Tennis, on Twitter @pennstateWTEN, and on Instagram @pennstateWTEN.