The Iowa State women’s tennis team will be traveling a little bit south of Ames for the Drake Invite in Des Moines, Iowa, happening from Friday through Sunday.
Four Cyclones will compete this weekend, with junior Valeska San Martin Ramirez, freshman Gabriella Kellner, freshman Kira Smith and sophomore Gabriela Felix being the listed four. Each player is supposed to play in four singles matches and three doubles matches.
The doubles team for this tournament has not been announced yet, and the main draw has also not been released.
Iowa State will compete alongside the University of North Dakota, the University of Northern Iowa, Eastern Michigan University, the University of Nebraska Omaha and the host school, Drake University.
This tournament will feature a wide variety of schools from different conferences. Iowa State University represents the Big 12, while the University of Northern Iowa and Drake University represent the Missouri Valley Conference.
The University of North Dakota and the University of Nebraska Omaha are in the Summit League. Eastern Michigan University is in the Mid-American Conference.
As the fall season draws closer to ending, these tournaments will give more reps to players while also being smaller tournaments than the big ITA tournaments that the Cyclones have previously attended.
Players like Smith, who only participated in one tournament, will be able to get more reps. Once the spring season begins, the Cyclones will start looking less for individual and doubles achievements and start looking for team achievements, as the spring season will be more of a whole team effort to win games against other colleges.
The spring season focuses more on the teams as they will begin competing against other universities individually. In three doubles matches, the school that wins at least two of those matches will get the first point, then six singles matches will be played, each also being worth a point. The team that gets at least four of the seven possible points will be the winner.
This fall season gives the Cyclones some more time to look at their players, as they’ve consistently been using eight players for the tournaments they’ve gone to. This gives them time to mix up some of the doubles teams and see more singles action from players that they haven’t seen as much of at tournaments.
The players competing in doubles don’t have to be the players competing in singles, so it gives more opportunity for them to find the best doubles and singles competitors to play in the spring season.
Matches will take place in the Roger Knapp Tennis Center in Des Moines, Iowa, starting at 8:30 a.m. Friday through Sunday.
