Hey Tennis Friends!
Welcome to the seventh season here at GroundsPass.net!
We are very fortunate here in Southern California, as two new USTA Pro Circuit events have been added to our busy tennis calendar. I took a trip to the USTA Pro Circuit Long Beach Futures Pro Tournament to cover the finals of this brand new event:
Here is the result for the match that I featured:
CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND (with seedings):
Takanyi Garanganga d. (6) Frederik Nielsen 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-4
Ranked No. 382 in the world, Garanganga did it the hard way all week. Having traveled from Amsterdam where he was training, he missed the entry deadline and showed up last week to sign into qualifying needing a wild card. Garanganga sat through two days of rain delays last Saturday and Sunday where not one ball was hit and then played and won every match he played for seven consecutive days, including two in qualifying and five in the main draw.
“I missed the deadline but I had to come here anyway on my way to Maui (for next week’s USTA Pro Circuit Challenger),” Garanganga said. “It was actually good for me to get the matches at the start of the year. I wasn’t playing very good at the beginning so it was good for me.”
The final was a match of momentum shifts and the large crowd on hand enjoyed the high-level tennis. Nielsen opened strong with an early break and led 4-1 in the first when midway through the sixth game Garanganga reached wide for a forehand and seemed to roll his right ankle.
He took a medical timeout and had his ankle wrapped, proceeded to break Nielsen’s serve and quickly got it to 4-4. In the first-set tiebreaker, Nielsen fell down 5-2 and on the eighth point following a missed forehand wide, Nielsen launched a ball halfway to downtown L.A. and was given a ball abuse warning.
But that seemed to lift his level of play as Nielsen then hit two big serves to pull it to 5-4. Garanganga missed a critical overhead long to make it 6-5 Nielsen, who then served out the set, which finally ended after an hour and 15 minutes.
Garanganga said he didn’t think back to the quarterfinals and semis where he also dropped the first set before coming back. “I just keep playing,” he said. “I just kept waiting for my chances. I was just playing in the moment and wasn’t thinking about past.”
Longtime GroundsPass.net subscribers may remember Garanganga when he was featured in my coverage of the 2011 USTA Pro Circuit in Laguna Niguel, CA:
2011 USTA Pro Circuit in Laguna Niguel, CA
Additional information in this report was provided by the USTA Pro Circuit PR Press Aide, Steve Pratt.
Here is the link to the page with the USTA Pro-Circuit events that we have in the United States this year:
2015 USTA Pro Circuit Calendars
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I’ll see you next time, with more tennis, . . . outside the lines!
– Marcus Tennis
Tags: 2015, El Dorado Tennis Center, Frederik Nielsen, Long Beach, Southern California, Steve Pratt, Takanyi Garanganga, Tennis, USTA Pro Circuit, USTA.com
