Friday, 10/05/2012

ATLANTA—The Georgia State men’s tennis team kicks-off its first season under head coach Joerg Barthel on Friday when it travels to Statesboro, Ga., for the Georgia Southern Championships.

Four student-athletes on the Panthers’ roster will see action in the ITA-sanctioned tournament, which runs from this Friday, Oct. 5, until Sunday afternoon. Georgia State joins Arkansas, Kennesaw State, Mercer, Savannah College of Art and Design, South Carolina-Aiken as the participating teams in the tournament. No. 60 GSU and No. 58 Arkansas are the only two teams in the tournament with national rankings.

The tournament consists of singles and doubles play beginning at 9 a.m. on Friday. Each player in the tournament is guaranteed three singles matches and three doubles matches in the tournament.

Four players were seeded in the two singles draws based on previous results with GSU senior Victor Valente claiming the No. 1 seed in the Blue Draw. Georgia State sophomore Sofiane Chevallier and senior Lucas Santa Ana were each seeded in the White Draw at numbers three and four, respectively.

Valente and Santa Ana will form GSU’s one doubles team in the doubles draw while Chevallier and newcomer Robert Schulze will form the other. Schulze is a junior transfer student from the University of Nebraska that joined the team prior to the fall semester.