The MSU club tennis team attended a tournament last weekend in Salt Lake City. The tournament was a sectional competition, part of a national tennis league called Tennis on Campus. There are 12 events beginning in 2011 around the nation to determine which teams will play in the National Campus Championship. This year’s championship will be held in Cary, North Carolina April 7-9.

The Tennis on Campus league is a USTA event offered on more than 500 campuses across the country. There are more than 30,000 students involved with the tournaments throughout the year. The MSU club tennis team took nine players as two teams to the Intermountain sectional event.
The teams consist of four to six players, half male and half female. Each team plays a men’s and women’s singles match, a men’s and women’s doubles match and a coed doubles match. All matches are played in World Team Tennis format. This means that each match is one set (the first team to win by two in six games), players can substitute in once per match and the total number of games won by each team is added to determine the winner.

The Salt Lake Sectional was separated into three brackets: gold, silver and bronze. Both Montana State teams made it to the silver bracket, and one of the teams finished in third place. There were eleven teams present at the competition including five schools from Utah, five schools from Colorado and MSU. Colorado State-Boulder has won this tournament four of the last five years. Last year they took both the first and second place slots.

The club tennis team meets every Thursday night in the Bobcat-Anderson Tennis facility from ten to midnight for practice. The president this year is Megan Bittinger, and the club advisor is Jason Swanson, who also works with the Bobcat women’s team.