INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- After winning its third-straight SCAC Women's Tennis championship, the Trinity Tigers booked their ticket to compete in the 49-team NCAA Division III Women's Tennis Championships, which is set to begin with the first-third round matchups this weekend, May 10-12. Interactive Bracket | NCAA Release
Trinity, which enters the NCAA Tournament as the 15th-ranked team in the ITA National Poll and third in the ITA West Regional poll, will be competing in the national tournament for the third year in a row and the 26th time in program history. Trinity owns seven NCAA Div. III Women’s Tennis semifinal appearances; two national runners-up finishes and a national title in 2000.
Trinity received a first-round bye and will open play on Saturday at North Carolina Wesleyan University in Rocky Mount, N.C., against Christopher Newport. The Captains, ranked 20th in the most recent ITA rankings, are 13-5 and are making their NCAA Tournament debut after earning a Pool-B bid. The winner of Trinity/Christopher Newport contest will take on the winner of Emory University (14-4) versus the first-round match-up winner of host North Carolina Wesleyan (12-6) and Pitt-Greensburg (12-2) in the regional finals on Sunday with a trop to the national quarterfinal round on the line.
The teams will play a single-elimination tournament with the first-, second- and third-rounds played at regional sites, Friday-Sunday, May 10-12, or Thursday-Saturday, May 9-11. Washington University in St. Louis will host the team championships finals, which will be held May 21-24 at Dwight Davis Tennis Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Student-athletes selected to the individual championships will be announced Wednesday, May 8.
The championship provides for a 49-team tournament. Automatic qualification (AQ) is granted to 38 conference champions, which form "Pool A." Two teams will be selected from true independents and schools from conferences that do not have an automatic bid for their champions (Pool B). The remaining nine teams are selected from those teams in conferences with automatic bids that did not win their conference's AQ and the remaining Pool B institutions (Pool C). The teams are geographically paired, whenever possible.
Claremont-M-S is the defending national champion, having defeated University of Chicago, 5-2, to claim the team title.
