No one wants to lose, but there is not disgrace in losing to UG in the finals.

Despite the score, we played pretty well. We were within a tie breaker of winning the doubles point. Our #1 doubles team beat theirs in a tight match. Realistically, without that doubles point our ladies had next to no chance of winning the title. As others have mentioned, UG is #2 and has only lost one match all year to #1 UNC.

Great tournament, ladies.

Ags move up to #10 in latest rankings!

From what I saw in the selection show, A&M women are the only seed on the men's or women's side not hosting. Quite infuriating.

Only thing I can guess is that they proposed the host sites earlier in the year. Towards the end of March, Northwestern was ranked #4 in the country, so guess the NCAA didn't expect them to falloff this bad.

I think Hershey is spot on. The 20 potential sites were selected early on. At the time we were probably ranked around 18. For whatever reason we did not make the cut. Don't think it was due to any omission by Mark or the athletic department.

aggietennisfan said:

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Hard to fathom that A&M isn't hosting. Doesn't make any sense. Hope Mark isn't thinking about leaving. Certainly the athletic department wouldn't allow that to happen after losing Joffe to Texas. Would be pretty embarrassing!

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We've beaten this horse to death - it is understood that the athletic department does not give a rip.

If Mark wants to leave, he will have plenty of opportunities, just like Howard did. They won't fight to keep him, and that is sad considering what a high-character man and leader he his and how much he has given Aggie tennis.

Part of it is that admin doesn't understand that Aggie tennis is not plug & play. Between Howard and Mark making it a near automatic, everyone has forgotten that a sweet 16 in women's tennis used to be a once in a generation deal.

The other part is the elephant in the room - there has been a strong push for female coaches coaching women's sports and in the sports that an AD doesn't care about, ethics aside, it looks better on their resume to have a mediocre female coach and get the diversity "points" than it does to have a program winning at an elite level.

If they hire a young female when Mark leaves (anything else would be shocking the way things are trending), they might find out really quickly that this is not a plug & play situation. It's a tough job and these are elite coaches and the program could easily and quickly be out of the top 25. I also don't think you're going to hire a successful female (think Alison Ojeda) away from a program that she already has rolling and has a better overall situation than A&M. Ask around college coaching: A&M is considered an out of the top 25 situation in which the coaches are vastly overachieving. But again, administrations that give zero thought to tennis don't know or care about all this and that sucks for Mark and the ten of us here that care, but it is what it is and it ain't gonna change.

BTW I am not a Denton fan and I say this through gritted teeth, but the exact same goes for him. Whatever shots you want to take at him (most of which I agree with), he has really done far better than anyone could hope for and you're not going to hire just anyone that can continue that.

Ladies beat Drake 4 - 0. We had won the first set in all the matches, and with the exception of #5 singles which was tied 6-6, we were leading in the two unfinished second sets. As we would hope, it appeared to be a dominating win.

At least on the 12th man website, there was no video link to the matches.