NEW LONDON, N.H. – May 6, 2019 - The Colby-Sawyer women's tennis team will play Nichols College on Friday in the NCAA Tournament First Round. The match will be played in Brunswick, Maine at Bowdoin College.    

BRACKET

The match will take place at 8 a.m. at the Pickard Courts on the campus of Bowdoin College. If there is bad weather, the match will move indoors to the Foreside Fitness & Tennis Club in Falmouth. 

Video Feed > HERE  (outdoors only)

Live Results > HERE

Colby-Sawyer (12-6) will make its seventh-straight NCAA Tournament appearance and eighth overall. In the fall, the Chargers won the Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) title over Johnson & Wales, a team they defeated in last year's NCAA First Round, to earn the conference's automatic bid. Colby-Sawyer became a member of the GNAC this season. Colby-Sawyer has won a first round match in its last three NCAA Tournament appearances.

The Chargers are led by GNAC Player of the Year Yashu Yang (Kunming City, China) at the top singles flight. Yang is 15-4 in singles action. First-year Anna Kopituk (Morristown, Tenn.), the GNAC Rookie of the Year, teams with Yang at the top doubles spot. The duo is 14-8 and went 6-0 in conference play. Kopituk also was undefeated in GNAC singles matches.

Senior Aislinn O'Connor (New Fairfield, Conn.) is 15-2 in singles this season and has climbed the all-time ranks in Colby-Sawyer history. She is third in career wins with 120, fourth in singles wins with 55 and third in doubles wins with 65.

Nichols (15-1) won the Commonwealth Coast Conference (CCC) title for the third year in a row after a 5-3 triumph over Endicott. Nichols enters its third-straight NCAA Tournament, fourth overall, on a two-match win streak. The Bison's lone loss of the season came at Division II Bentley, 5-4.

The two teams met in the fall and the Bison came away with an 8-1 victory.

The winner of the Colby-Sawyer/Nichols match will play regional host #7 Bowdoin (14-5) on Saturday at 8 a.m.
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The other Friday first-round pod match is between SUNY New Paltz (17-0) and Husson (10-1) at 10:30 a.m. The winner will play #19 MIT (16-3) on Saturday at 10:30 a.m.

The teams will play a single-elimination tournament with the first, second- and third-rounds played at regional sites, Friday-Sunday, May 10-12, or Thursday-Saturday, May 9-11. Kalamazoo College will host the team championships finals, which will be held May 20-22 at Stowe Stadium in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Student-athletes selected to the individual championships will be announced Wednesday, May 8.

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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