Central Region-Early Returns

Well, this is the 700th post on this blog, and it has been fun to keep this going. Thank you to the 396 of you who checked in on us Saturday! Hope some of you were able to view the Live Streaming? I am working on being able to provide Live Streaming of Court #1 on all of our Indoor Matches.

The Central Region is usually the earliest of the four regions to get significant play underway. Now two weekends into February we do have some results, but not yet enough to publish rankings. Perhaps next week!

What is readily apparent is that it is still difficult to go from indoors to outdoors, as evidenced by Gustavus' trip to Texas. I will still predict Gustavus will be a factor come the month of May. Whitewater looks to be very strong, possibly the #3 team in the region. Kenyon appears worthy of their #2 national ranking.

Intriguing match mid-week this week: Earlham vs Denison. Earlham has a strong lineup on paper this year. Denison is always solid and well-coached.

Grinnell is very, very deep, as is Coe. Both schools have the challenge of transitioning from "good" towards the top 10 in the Central. Both have big opportunities this weekend. Grinnell gets up matches with Whitewater and Wheaton, Coe travels to Kalamazoo, where they have never won.

Special shout-out to Augustana, who by winning 3 Supers and a doubles TB, knocked off annual power Luther 5-4. Look for Luther to bounce back quickly this next weekend.

Other scores of interest:

St Mary's 54 over Carroll
Baldwin Wallace 63 over Oberlin
Elmhurst 63 over Wabash

Many of the higher ranked Central squads kick off this weekend, including Case Western, Kalamazoo. Wheaton, and Depauw.

Until next Monday......