Georgia women's tennis advances to National Championship match
Georgia women’s tennis will play for a National Championship on Sunday night, taking on Texas A&M at 7:30 p.m. ET after defeating Pepperdine 4-0 in the semifinals on Saturday.
The Bulldogs, seeded seventh in the nation, took down Alabama State and Florida State in the first two rounds before advancing to the championship site in Stillwater, Oklahoma with a win over Cal. Then, on Friday, Georgia knocked off the No. 2 team in the nation Stanford 4-1 to advance to the semis against sixth-seeded Pepperdine.
Dasha Vidmanova, Mell Reasco and Guillermina Grant earned points for Georgia in the singles while Grant, Reasco, Mai Nirundorn and Anastasiia Lopata were part of winning the doubles point for the Bulldogs against Pepperdine. Entering the weekend, Grant led the team with 27 singles points secured this season, followed closely behind by Lopata and Nirundorn both with 25. The doubles team of Aysegul Mert and Vidamnova has won 25 of their matches while Grant and Nirundorn were in second with 23 wins of their own.
Under the direction of first-year head coach Drake Bernstein, Georgia won the SEC Tournament, dropping just a single point on their way to the title over Texas A&M. Bernstein becomes the first head coach in program history to lead the team to an NCAA National Championship appearance in their first season at the helm, where UGA is faced with its first SEC opponent in a National Championship match. It’s Georgia’s sixth appearance in the championship match, the latest coming in 2019.
“Just really proud of this team, really proud of the ground that we’ve covered in the last really heavy three months. This team’s got a lot of character, a lot of heart, a lot of fight,” Bernstein shared after the semifinal victory. “They’re playing for a lot of people back home, whether that’s back home where they’re from and families, or the UGA family that’s just the best support in college tennis. I think that that’s the kind of the effort that you get when you’ve got that kind of support, and it’s awesome to see them take advantage of that and let themselves shine on this kind of stage.”
Georgia and Texas A&M get their match underway at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN+ with a national championship on the line. The Bulldogs last won the national title in 2000, previously doing so in 1994 as well. UGA also claims a quartet of indoor women’s tennis titles in 1994, 1995, 2002 and 2019, sanctioned by the ITA.
