May 3, 2016
By Joanne Norell
NOTRE DAME, Ind. — The University of Notre Dame men’s tennis team will make its 13th-straight NCAA Division I Men’s Championship appearance next weekend as the Irish travel to Evanston, Illinois, to face Stanford in the tournament’s first round.
The Irish (15-13) and Cardinal (14-10) will meet in their first-round match on May 14, while 14th-seeded host Northwestern (25-4) will take on Valparaiso (22-5) on the other side of the pod. The winners will meet on May 15 for the opportunity to advance the NCAA Championship quarterfinal.
“The 2015-16 men’s tennis season has been extremely competitive. This bracket is a great reflection of that competitiveness and the hard work each student-athlete and team has been putting in throughout the season. I look forward to watching as teams advance to the final site in Tulsa.” said Bobby Bayliss, former Irish head coach, current director of tennis facilities and the Division I men’s tennis committee chair.
The top 16 overall seeds will serve as hosts for first- and second-round regional action, with 31 teams receiving automatic bids and the remaining 33 earning at-large bids to the 64-team, single-elimination tournament. The winners of each four team pod will advance to the NCAA Division I Men’s Championship quarterfinals held May 20-24 at the Case Tennis Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tournament matches will be regulation dual matches with three eight-game, pro-set doubles played for one team point, followed by six singles matches, each valued at one team point, played in best-of-three sets. Regular scoring will be used and a 12-point tiebreaker will be played at seven-games-all in doubles and at six-games-all in singles.
During the championships, all matches will be stopped after the doubles point is decided. All remaining individual matches will be stopped once a team winner (four points won) has been determined. The score will only reflect completed matches.
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For the latest on all things Irish men’s tennis, follow @NDMensTennis on Twitter and like Notre Dame Men’s Tennis on Facebook.
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Joanne Norell, athletics communications assistant director at the University of Notre Dame, has been part of the Fighting Irish athletics communications team since 2014 and coordinates communications efforts for the Notre Dame women’s soccer, men’s tennis, women’s tennis and fencing programs. Norell is a 2011 graduate of Purdue University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in mass communication, and earned her master’s degree in sports industry management from Georgetown University in 2013.