Buckeyes Open Season at Miami and Baylor – Ohio State Buckeyes
9/17/2015 12:00:00 AM | Women's Tennis
Sept. 17, 2015
Under Armour/H-E-B Kickoff live video/stats
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Ohio State women’s tennis team will open its 2015-16 campaign at two tournaments this weekend, with players heading to both the Miami Fall Invite in Coral Gables, Fla., and the Under Armour/H-E-B Kickoff in Waco, Texas. Both tournaments run Friday through Sunday.
Juniors Gabriella De Santis and Miho Kowase are heading to Miami, while junior Ferny Angeles Paz, freshman Andrea Ballinger, redshirt senior Nicole Flower, senior Grainne O’Neill and sophomores Anna Sanford and Olivia Sneed will travel to Texas.
The tournament at Baylor is a hidden dual format and includes Alabama, host Baylor and Texas A&M along with the Buckeyes. Ohio State is scheduled to play Alabama and Texas A&M in doubles and Texas A&M and Baylor in singles.
The Miami tournament features players from Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh, Auburn and Vanderbilt and the host Hurricanes. It has two eight-team doubles draws and two 16-player singles draws. Kowase and De Santis are in the orange doubles draw and will open play vs. a duo from Miami Friday morning. In singles, Kowase is the No. 1 seed in the green draw and begins play at 11:30 a.m. Friday vs. Sofia Blanno of Auburn. De Santis is in the orange singles bracket and will take on Audrey Ann Blakely from Pitt at 10 a.m. Friday in the quarterfinals.
In the Rankings
In the preseason rankings released by the ITA this week, Buckeye junior and two-time All-Big Ten honoree Gabriella De Santis is No. 117. Francesca Di Lorenzo tops the list of Division I freshmen and newcomers.
Everybody’s Back … Plus Two
Ohio State returned all eight players from the 2015 team that finished second in the Big Ten, reached the B1G Tournament championship match and earned an at-large berth into the NCAA Tournament.
Joining the Buckeye squad are freshmen Andrea Ballinger and Francesca Di Lorenzo. Both are Central Ohio natives, with Ballinger from Columbus and a Columbus Academy graduate. Di Lorenzo hails from New Albany and attended New Albany High School.
Di Lorenzo Reaches US Open Junior Singles and Doubles Semifinals
Freshman Francesca Di Lorenzo had an amazing run at the US Open Junior Championships in New York, reaching the semifinals in both singles and doubles. Her path to the singles semifinals included two three-set wins (first round, quarterfinals) and victories over two seeded players, including one in the Top 5. In doubles, she and her partner Luisa Stefani, a freshman at Pepperdine, lost in a super tiebreaker in the semifinals. The tandem entered the tournament as the No. 5 seed.
Di Lorenzo, a New Albany, Ohio, native who is ranked No. 26 in the most recent ITF junior rankings, also played in this year’s Wimbledon and French Open junior championships. She won the ITF Women’s Pro Tennis Open of Austin in Summer 2015, as well as doubles titles at tournaments in Belgium and Brazil. Di Lorenzo first competed in the U.S. Open junior tournament in 2014, winning her first round match.
