tOfficial Challenger Tour Thread

[Smart]

I fully expect this thread to die out if we don't get some ESPN Tennis Forum converts, but i'll start it anyways. The Winnetka Challenger (near Chicago) is going on this week, and the top eight seeds are all in the Quarters (which is extremely rare).

This tournament is especially important because two young Americans, 23 year old Steve Johnson and 20 year old Jack Sock, are both lurking just around the top 100. If either of them get the win, they will get MDs into the US Open and likely will get passes to all majors for a while. Both players have top 100 talent, so it is nice to see them doing well.

The matches in the quarters are:

Bogomolov-Zverev
Smyczek-Klahn
Young-Sock
Devvarman-Johnson (two college tennis legends)

There's five other challengers this week. The biggest is Braunschweig, where Florian Meyer is playing and former junior #1 Jiri Vesely, one of the best prospects in tennis, has a chance to climb into the top 100. The others are in Manta, Ecuador, Portoroz, Slovenia, Timisoara, Romania, and Todi, Italy.

 

[Old Lion]

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, there is so little coverage that it gets difficult for these types of tourneys to get any interest. Even the Newport HOF tourney only recently started getting some attention.

 

[Smart]

So Jack Sock took down Somdev Devvarman to reach the final in Winnetka. His opponent is another former NCAA Champ, Stanford's Bradley Klahn. If Sock wins he climbs from #102 to 80ish.

In Braunschweig, the guys I mentioned before (Mayer and Vesely) are into the finals. If the young Czech can win the title over the top 35 player, he'll be in the top 85 at his 20th birthday this week. Combined with his huge Junior results and really powerful game (he's just really starting to adjust to his 6'6 frame), he's definitely a player to watch.

American Michael Russell is in the final in Manta, Ecuador as well.