Posted: Apr 24, 2018
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Santa Clara women's tennis who qualified as the sixth seed in the West Coast Conference Tournament will play third seed Loyola Marymount on Thursday at 1 p.m. PT. The tournament will take place at the Biszantz Family Tennis Center in Claremont, California from Thursday to Saturday.
"It feels good to make the tournament after missing out last season. We feel good about our improvement this past season even though our record doesn't quite reflect that," said Broncos head coach Ben Cabell.
The Broncos (8-12, 3-6 WCC) tied for sixth in the conference standings with San Diego but had the advantage in the tiebreaker winning the head-to-head matchup against the Toreros.
While the Broncos finished its regular season on Saturday, Cabell and the squad were on stand by waiting on the results of Sunday's Pacific-San Diego match to find out its tournament fate. The Broncos needed a USD win since it held the tiebreaker advantage over USD but not UOP.
"I had told the team our scenario ahead of time so the players were following the UOP-USD match on twitter. And thats how we found out that we made the tournament seeing that USD beat UOP 4-0," said Cabell.
As for Thursday's opening round opponent, LMU, the Broncos got a close look at the Lions (15-5, 7-2 WCC) last week when it came up on the short end, losing 4-2.
"We just played LMU so we know what we are going to get," said Cabell.
In the match, the Broncos took the doubles point and picked up a singles win by Elvena Gevargiz over Sibhan Anderson on court three. The match was competitive with Katya Tabachnik taking her match to three sets before succumbing to Yesica De Lucas on court four. Also, Zeina El Tawil was ahead 6-3, 4-6, 3-1 against Eva Marie Voracek on court two before it was stopped with LMU clinching the match.
LMU comes into the tournament having won seven of its last eight matches, losing only to Gonzaga on April 7.
The winner of the Santa Clara and LMU match will advance to the semifinals to play second seed Gonzaga on Friday at 2 p.m.
The live scoring link can be found on the 2018 WCC tennis championship central.
