PROVO -- After Saturday's action at the 2006 Wilson/ITA Fall Regional Tennis Championships, the BYU tennis teams came off the courts having dominated the competition. The men missed first place by only a few points in their tournament in Las Vegas and the women ended their weekend in Salt Lake City with a 43-13 record overall, validating their spot as No. 1 in the region.
In men's doubles action, BYU's James Ludlow and Dominik Kaufhold lost a close match to the No. 1 seeded team of Max Jones and Kamil Pajkowski from the University of New Mexico, 8-5.
"They had a real chance to win because they were serving at 5-4 to tie the match," BYU head coach Brad Pearce said. "They lost a heartbreaker. It was a good match against a good team and they can hold their heads high."
Despite the loss, the Cougars still held off a number of solid teams to clinch second place and a berth in the four-team regional playoff in January for a shot at the ITA National Indoor Tournament.
"This is a tough week," Pearce said. "It was hot and there were a lot of matches. They were long days and I was really proud of how our guys competed through the last day. I think for as many teams that are here, what we did is a great accomplishment."
As for accomplishments, what the BYU women's team pulled off this weekend is something that head coach Craig Manning said he will not soon forget.
"I was hoping we would perform this well and this consistent, but I had no idea that if we did so we'd be able to do this," he said.
Manning was referring to the 28-10 overall singles record his team compiled this weekend combined with the 15-3 doubles record. Two of the doubles losses came in matches that featured two BYU teams. Jenny Miccoli and Anastasia Sourkova had to beat their teammates Dolly Chang and Chie Hayasaka in the semifinals to be able to play against BYU's Lauren Jones and Sofia Holden in the finals. Miccoli and Sourkova won the match 8-3, but the whole team counts themselves winners after the numbers it put up at the fall regional tournament.
"We set high performance goals and we hit them and that's why the outcome has been so great," Manning said. "We really performed extremely well in the tournament from top to bottom."
In other action, sophomore transfer Cale Planck lost a close match to Boise State's Blake Boswell who won the Utah Fall Classic at BYU in September. Sourkova knocked off Monica Milevski of Colorado and Tatiana Ganzha of Boise State to reach the final singles match, but pulled out of the tournament so as to not play on Sunday. Miccoli also pulled out of her singles match with top-seeded Liz Ferris of Utah due to soreness in her shoulder on which she recently had surgery.
To view all of the results from both the men's and women's tournaments, visit itatennis.com and click on the Wilson/ITA Regional Championships link.