NEW LONDON, N.H. – May 7, 2018 - The Colby-Sawyer women's tennis team will play Johnson & Wales on Friday in the NCAA Tournament First Round. The match will be played in Medford, Massachusetts at Tufts University.   

BRACKET

Colby-Sawyer (16-5) will make its sixth-straight NCAA Tournament appearance and seventh overall. In the fall, the Chargers won the North Atlantic Conference (NAC) title over Husson to earn the automatic bid. Colby-Sawyer has won a first round match in its last two NCAA Tournament appearances.

The Chargers hosted Johnson & Wales, a future Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) opponent, in the fall and defeated the Wildcats 8-1 in the first-ever meeting between the two teams.   

Johnson & Wales (15-1) will enter this year's tournament with a 15-1 record, with the lone blemish coming to Colby-Sawyer, and an 11-match winning streak. The Wildcats defeated Simmons College, 5-2, in the GNAC Championship to claim the program's second-straight title. The team will be making its second trip to the NCAA Tournament after appearing for the first time in program history last season. The Wildcats fell to Wilkes, 5-0.   

The winner of the Colby-Sawyer/Johnson & Wales match will play the winner of #11 MIT (17-2) vs. John Jay (11-3) on Saturday.

The other Friday first-round pod match is between Nazareth (14-4) and Rhode Island College (16-0). The winner will play regional host #6 Tufts (12-6) on Saturday.

Match times will be announced on Tuesday.

The teams will play a single-elimination tournament with the first, second- and third- rounds played at regional sites, Friday-Sunday, May 11-13, or Thursday-Saturday, May 10-12. Claremont McKenna-Harvey Mudd Scripps Colleges will host the team championships finals, which will be held May 21-23 at Biszantz Tennis Center in Claremont, California. Student-athletes selected to the individual championships will be announced Wednesday, May 9.

The championships provide for a 49-team tournament. Automatic qualification (AQ) is granted to 40 conference champions, which form "Pool A." One team will be selected from true independents and schools from conferences that do not have an automatic bid for their champions (Pool B). The remaining 8 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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