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A Georgia – Georgia Tech “Wild Card” Tournament Would Add Excitement, Ease Controversy For Atlanta Open

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By Randy Walker

@TennisPublisher

There was some controversy with regard to the wild cards that were given out at the 2023 Atlanta Open tennis championships. It initially left out local NCAA singles champion Ethan Quinn of the University of Georgia, who was passed over in favor of Andres Martin the No. 1 player from Georgia Tech who lost in the first round of the NCAAs, as well as Atlanta native, former Georgia Tech star, recent first-time ATP titlist and eventual Wimbledon quarterfinalist Chris Eubanks.

Wild cards are a sensitive subject and often controversial. Roger Federer once compared wild cards to wedding invitations where the people not invited, who don’t make the cut, are not going to be happy. On the ATP and WTA tours, tournament directors will often award wild cards to players who will enhance attendance and buzz for their event. Sometimes one is given to a star player whose ranking has dropped and preventing direct entry. Or a wild card is offered to a star player who did not originally enter the event but wants to play at the last moment. Other times it is given to a deserving local player who will also help sell tickets locally.

The Atlanta Open, under former tournament director Eddie Gonzalez, implanted a “college night” program where the event would alternate awarding wild cards to players from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. This was done on an alternating basis, but what happens in a year where a player from one school is more “deserving” of the wild card when it’s the other schools turn to receive the wild card? The issue can up this year under new tournament director Peter Lebedevs when, technically, it was the University of Georgia’s turn to receive the main draw wild card and its top player Ethan Quinn was the NCAA singles champion. The issue brought up a potential Tennis Anti-Corruption violation as discussed here: http://www.worldtennismagazine.com/archives/22193 (As it turned out, Quinn got a last second wild card when John Isner received a special exemption entry, thus opening up the wild card he received.)

But there is an easier way to resolve this Georgia vs. Georgia Tech wild card issue at the Atlanta Open that would avoid controversy and create bigger buzz and anticipation for the tournament – have the players play for it via a special wild card tournament. Gather the top four players from each respective team and play a three-day wild card event, alternating between playing it at the Georgia Tech and UGA tennis facilities, where the winner of the event gets the main draw wild card and the runner-up gets a qualifying wild card. It would provide for great pre-promotion and buzz for the event, with a lot of pre-event chatter and anticipation. The Georgia vs. Georgia Tech rivalry is strong in the state of Georgia. In football, it’s called “Clean, Old Fashioned Hate.” This trickles down to other sports too, including tennis. The 2023 Georgia vs. Georgia Tech tennis match held indoors at Georgia Tech was at fan capacity – even all-time Georgia tennis legend Al Parker had a hard time getting in for the match! This wild card event could add a new twist to the rivalry with spots in the Atlanta Open as the prize.

The quarterfinal match-ups for this special wild card event could be, in draw order, UGA No. 1 vs. Tech No. 4, UGA No. 2 vs. Tech No. 3, UGA No. 3 vs. Tech No. 2 and UGA No. 4 vs. Tech No. 1. You could also pair this event down to just the top two players from each school, if there are time or schedule constraints. You can also perhaps have a clause in the rules of the wild card event that if a Georgia Tech or UGA player wins the NCAAs, they automatically get the main draw wild card and the aforementioned wild card event would only be for a qualifying wild card.

There are increased number of “wild card” tournaments in pro tennis and many feel there should be more. A former top USTA junior and college All-American texted me that he believes part of the reason why there is an increased number of American players in the top 100 are due to competitive opportunities for wild cards. In particular, the USTA holds wild card “challenges” for three Grand Slam tournament opportunities. For the U.S. Open, the USTA awards a wild card to the highest ranking point winner for summer hard court events for players not already accepted into the main draw of the event. Since the USTA has reciprocal wild card relationships with the Australian Open and French Open, it holds similar “challenges” for those wild card spots. Of interest is that Chris Eubanks earned the Australian Open wild card via one of these challengers. (technically, he finished second to Ben Shelton, who actually earned a direct entry due to his strong results and did not need the wild card). Can you say that Chris Eubanks became a much better player perhaps partially because of this “quest” last Fall that got him into the Australian Open and helped he reach the quarterfinals of the Miami Open and Wimbledon and win his first ATP singles title in Mallorca?

Of course, the USTA also annually awards main draw singles and doubles wild cards to the winners of the annual USTA Boys and Girls National 18s championships. When an American wins the NCAA singles championship, the USTA also traditionally awards main draw wild cards, like it did to Quinn from the University of Georgia and Fresno, Calif., this year.

The Australian Open used to hosts two wild card tournaments, one exclusively for Australian players and another for players from Asian nations (held in China) so as to more closely associate the tournament as the Grand Slam of Asia Pacific. In 2017, Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan won the Asia-Pacific event and used that momentum to upset world No 2 Novak Djokovic at the event. Read about that and a deeper discussion about wild cards here http://www.worldtennismagazine.com/archives/13906

Wimbledon has a qualifying wild card event that is for all British players, which Marcus Willis famously won the men’s title in 2016. He managed to ride the momentum to win three matches in qualifying (defeating Andrey Rublev and Daniil Medvedev en route) and won his first round match to play Roger Federer on Centre Court in the second round.

Two events on the “Futures” circuit on the ITF World Tennis Tour that award ALL of their wild cards with merit-based events are the $15,000 Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation Tennis Championships in Vero Beach, Florida (full disclosure, I’m the co-tournament director) and also the $25,000 men’s event in Edwardsville, Illinois. These would include one main draw singles wild card, two qualifying singles wild cards and two main draw doubles wild cards.  Said David Lipe, tournament director for Edwardsville, “We love giving players the opportunity to show that they belong in our tournament and we love having events that create buzz in the community. We’ve been doing play-ins for ten years now. It extends the tournament beyond just its one week and helps get the community excited. Affording players the opportunity to compete at the highest level is a cornerstone of what we do.“

The wild card events in Vero Beach can be described and seen here: “The Best “Wild Card” Tennis Tournament In The World” https://youtu.be/Pmb49avrsQQ and here: “Vero Beach’s ‘King of the Hill’ – One of the USA’s Best Local Tennis Events” https://youtu.be/CfXUdD63BZg and here “Sea Oaks Mardy Fish “Wild Card” Tournament Final Video” https://youtu.be/LPrjyMuKvl8 and a discussion here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k2IAlB3juo

Irina Falconi swings hard, laughs hard

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJWa9JY-mBY&w=560&h=343]

– Video produced by Wonok Kim –

 

By Christopher Lancette

WASHINGTON — Third-year pro Irina Falconi and I sit down at a bar. It’s open mic night for comedians and Falconi is ready to take the stage.

Actually, that’s a lie.

We’ve never been to a bar together. The sum total of our relationship is the time I spent watching her compete in the last two Citi Open tournaments and the interview we did earlier this month. The reason I wanted to chat with the Ecuador-born New Yorker currently ranked No. 111 in singles is because I had to see if she was as hilarious and honest in person as she is in the blog posts she writes for the WTA and World Team Tennis.

Turns out that the 22-year-old really is that funny. She made me laugh so hard on and off camera that I’d be afraid to have dinner with her for fear I’d spit my beverage all over her.

Ask Falconi about her next goal in life and she doesn’t even mention tennis.

“My goal is to reach Lady Gaga status of 25 million Twitter followers,” she deadpans during our “The Changeover” video interview. She’s at about 2,100 now. Follow her immediately @irinafalconi. If you help her reach 2,500, she’ll be off and running. No doubt she’ll appreciate it. Maybe she’ll even come up with a name for her fans. I’m sure it would be better than “Little Monsters.”

How did she make the agonizing decision to play college tennis instead of turning pro? She didn’t agonize.

“I had a tournament that went 0-6, 6-0, 0-6,” she remembers. “I lost. I said, ‘Mom, I’m going to college.’”

Oblivious to how college recruiting works, Falconi reached out to Georgia Tech women’s coach Bryan Shelton. She had met him briefly but hadn’t communicated with him in nine months. There’s nothing college coaches love more than thinking they’ve been given up for dead.

“I asked if he had a spot,” she says. “He said, ‘Yeah, but we’ve got to hurry.’ A month later I was in school. It was ridiculous. He had only seen me play once so I just kind of showed up. I hadn’t seen the campus and didn’t know what I wanted to study.”

She quickly ruled out Georgia Tech’s traditional engineering route. She chose history.

“There was no English major at Georgia Tech so that’s the reason why I did it,” she says. “I wasn’t into the whole math and science thing. I was pretty sure I’d live without having AP physics in my degree — pretty sure I’d be OK.”

Besides, Falconi can do things the nerds can’t — like crush a ball with various spins and speeds. And when is the last time a math club member beat a No. 14 seed in the second round of the U.S. Open? Falconi did that in 2011, taking out Dominika Cibulkova in a dramatic, come-from-behind victory. She has reached a career-high of No. 73 and looks to best that ASAP. She also won four ITF titles from 2007 to 2010 and broke all kinds of school records in the two years she spent with the Yellow Jackets.

Has there been a part of WTA life that was harder than she expected?

“Losing sucks,” she says. “Last year, I was in Asia and I lost four first rounds in a row, and I was alone. For four weeks, I was alone. I came back to visit a friend in L.A. for 12 hours. The next week, I won the gold at the Pan Am Games. You just never know, but losing definitely is not fun.”

Blogging is, and she excels at that, too.

Falconi blogs from all over the place – planes, trains, automobiles, tournaments, World Team Tennis matches, and hotels. She shares her new life as a pro the way the rest of us would if we suddenly made the tour and began having all kinds of amazing experiences: She writes with excitement and joy. She also plays loose with grammar, not because she’s incapable of producing perfect prose but because she’s in touch with her inner Snoop Dogg.

Take the time she first met John Isner.

“So, I went up to him,” she wrote, “stopped him in his tracks, and asked him ‘Hey man, look I gotta ask you, how tall are you?’ And he answers “Eh, about 6’9, 6’10.’ So me, being the unfiltered little teenager that I was, looks at him in astonishment and says ‘Dang, you’re a TREE!’ And I walked off.”

She pulls no punches on babies screaming on airplanes, self-absorbed folks that won’t put their cell phones on mute even when stuck in claustrophobic quarters, or a Boston Lobsters’ teammate drawing on her arm while she was busy signing autographs after a World Team Tennis match. “REEEEEEEL mature,” she wrote, sending Vanna White into a frenzy.

Falconi also likes to invent words.

My favorite Falcon-ism is “anywhoozer.” That’s the transition she uses to start a new paragraph that loops back to her previous point – but only after she has gone for a long stroll down tangent lane. (Maybe that’s a name for her fans: the “Anywhoozers.” I want royalties if she puts it on t-shirts!)

Blogging helps Falconi relax. It also happens to be an excellent way to interact with fans. She even answers questions in the blog from the Anywhoozers. (That does have a ring to it, doesn’t it? I know Falconi will let me know if it doesn’t. She didn’t hesitate to crack on my penmanship when she saw me scribbling away during the interview. “Are you a doctor as well? You’ve got the handwriting down. That’s all you need.”)

Falconi hits the target when she adds that so many fans “are bored with the mundane. Oh, I hit cross-courts today and I hit down-the-lines today. I figured I’d spice it up a little bit. It’s fun to throw in a little joke here and there. People want to know what tennis players are about, not just on the court.”

She put a particularly interesting twist on a night of getting gussied after a match with her WTT Boston Lobster teammates.

“After that, we got to dress up and join our friends for a wonderful dinner at this fantastic venue,” she wrote.” Ya know, tennis players probably feel like Superman sometimes. Cuz Lois Lane would always just see him in his regular clothing — which to us is tennis clothing. And when he put his cape on, he would become Superman — yet we become normal when we put on regular nice girly clothing … bah, you know what I mean.”

I do, actually. I’ll spend a week covering a women’s tournament and interviewing a player multiple times – then struggle to recognize her when she walks right past me in street clothes two hours later.

When Falconi is in her normal-person disguise, she likes to read voraciously. She’s also into music. She tells me that her favorite artist right now is Usher. I decide to see if I can turn the table on Falconi and make her chuckle by telling her about my near encounter with the guy many years ago. I don’t know anything about music and had no idea why burger flippers at an Atlanta Wendy’s were going nuts about a man picking up a bite at a drive-through one night. They tell me that was “Usher”. I asked them what was so exciting about meeting a guy who shows you to your seat in a theater.

Falconi gives me a blank stare: I bombed.

“Sometimes I’m too proud to laugh,” she says, sympathetically. “That was really funny. Deep down inside, I’m laughing.”

Suuuure she is.

Our conversation turns serious for a moment, the video camera having stopped rolling long ago. I mention that I recognize that life on the pro tour is not necessarily as easy and glorious as fans might think. I see the brutally long days of intense physical work, career-determining stress that comes with each match and brutal travel schedules. I ask her if she’s having a good time – if she really enjoys her career on the courts.

“At the end of the day, I have one of the best lives you could possibly ask for,” she tells me. “I travel the world and get to play competitively and make money. How many people would love to do that?”

Great point.

I thank her for her time and wish her well in the tournaments to come. Falconi heads to the nearest phone booth for a quick change and a flight to Montreal.

Follow Christopher Lancette on Twitter @chrislancette.

Falconi, Kendrick, Lucic Highlight US Open Qualifiers

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It was a memorable Saturday for 20-year-old Irina Falconi, the former Georgia Tech All-American who easily defeated Canadian Stephanie Dubois in the final round of qualifying to earn her first entry into the U.S. Open main draw.

In fact, make that her first entry into any Grand Slam main draw. And it will be even more memorable if she can build on three qualifying wins by getting a win or two when the Open begins on Monday.

Falconi won 6-3, 6-1 over Dubois, the No. 25 seed, but is the only U.S. woman to qualify, and that won’t sit well with the people who run the USTA Player Development program in Boca Raton, Fla., and Carson, Calif. — the two main training sites.

It may be a big step forward for Falconi, who used two years in college to mature, but it’s a small step back for U.S. women after two Americans (Shenay Perry and Carly Gullikson) qualified at the 2009 Open and three (Alexa Glatch, Kristie Ahn and Perry) in 2008.

Meanwhile, only two American men qualified — No. 22 seed Robert Kendrick, who is ranked 147, and No. 219 Ryan Harrison, who got through his final round of qualifying on Friday. Kendrick on Saturday defeated Tatsuma Ito 6-3, 6-3. It’s the second Slam in a row in which Kendrick has qualified, having won his way into the Wimbledon main draw in June.

The U.S. had a chance for a fourth qualifier, but 32-year-old veteran Kevin Kim was beaten in the final round by Ricardas Berankis of Lithuania by 6-1, 6-3. Like Harrison, Berankis trains at the Bollettieri IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla.

A year ago, three American men qualified for the Open — Donald Young, Michael Yani and Jesse Witten.

There are 16 qualifiers in both the men’s and women’s tournaments and none of them has had a higher career ranking than onetime wonder teen Mirjana Lucic, who at age 16 had reached No. 11 in the world and who, a year later, was a semifinalist at Wimbledon.

Tall, physically strong even as a teenager, she appeared headed for a heralded career in tennis, but was beset by injuries and personal problems before re-committing to the game a couple years ago.

Now 28 and ranked No. 153, she qualified and is playing her first U.S. Open in eight years.