NEW LONDON, N.H. – May 8, 2017 - The Colby-Sawyer women's tennis team will play Bridgewater State at 1 p.m. on Friday in the NCAA Tournament First Round. The match will be played in Brunswick, Maine at Bowdoin College.  

BRACKET

Colby-Sawyer (16-5) will make its fifth straight NCAA Tournament appearance and sixth overall after winning Sunday's North Atlantic Conference (NAC)/North Eastern Athletic Conference (NEAC) crossover title. In last year's NCAA Tournament, also held at the Pickard Courts on the campus of Bowdoin, the Chargers earned the program's first tournament win by defeating UMass Dartmouth of the Little East Conference, 5-0. The team then fell to No. 17 Tufts in the second round.  

Friday's match will be the eighth meeting between the Chargers and Bears with Colby-Sawyer holding a 5-2 advantage. Bridgewater State won the last meeting in 2014 by a score of 7-2.

Although Bridgewater State (11-5) is a primary member of the Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference (MASCAC), the Bears are affiliate members of the Little East Conference (LEC) in tennis and field hockey. Bridgewater State captured its fifth LEC title in the fall after edging Rhode Island College, 5-4, in the title match. The Bears have played just one match this spring, but it was a 7-2 victory over Salem State on April 29. BSU will be making its fifth trip to the NCAA Tournament and first since 2014 when the team fell Wilkes, 5-0.  

The winner of the Colby-Sawyer/Bridgewater State match will play the regional host and 8th ranked Polar Bears of Bowdoin (14-5) on Saturday at noon. 

The other Friday first round match is between No. 22 MIT (12-8) and Gwynedd Mercy (14-0) at 3:30 p.m. The winner will play 7th-ranked Wesleyan (11-4) on Saturday at 2:30 p.m.

The teams will play a single-elimination tournament with the first, second- and third-rounds played at regional sites, Friday-Sunday, May 12-14, or Thursday-Saturday, May 11-13. University of the South and the Chattanooga Sports Commission will host the team championships finals, which will be held May 22-27 at The Champions Tennis Club in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Student-athletes selected to the individual championships will be announced Wednesday, May 10.

The championships provide for a 49-team tournament. Automatic qualification (AQ) is granted to 38 conference champions, which form "Pool A." Two teams were selected from true independents and schools from conferences that do not have an automatic bid for their champions (Pool B). The remaining nine teams are selected from those teams in conferences with automatic bids that did not win their conference's AQ and the remaining Pool B institutions (Pool C). The teams are geographically paired, whenever possible.

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