By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
The University of Georgia is the preferred permanent host for the NCAA Tennis Championships, a new poll revealed.
Colette Lewis of ZooTennis, the preeminent blogger for collegiate and junior tennis, posted a poll on her @ZooTennis Twitter profile on Wednesday, June 15 asking her 10,500-plus followers about the site of future NCAA Tennis Championships.
The University of Georgia as the permanent host of the event received a strong majority of the votes, with 42.6 percent of the vote followed by the USTA National Campus in Orlando, Florida placing second with 28.5 percent of the vote.
The poll received 733 votes from followers of Lewis, who are mostly ardent followers of college and junior tennis. Lewis posted four choices in her poll, 1) Athens, every year (42.6 percent), Lake Nona every year (28.5 percent), Continue rotating (18.3 percent) 1 and 2 every other year (10.6 percent)
Over 50 percent of those polled feel that NCAA Tennis should be played in Athens, Georgia at least every other year.
The University of Georgia first hosted the NCAA Tennis Championships in 1972, under the leadership and promotion of legendary Georgia Bulldog coach Dan Magill. It was so overwhelmingly successful, with crowds of thousands of fans that was never seen before in college tennis, that the facility was awarded as the semi-permanent site of the event starting in 1977. After Georgia’s tennis program began to win NCAA Championships on its home courts in 1985 and then again in 1987, concern arose in college tennis circles that the Bulldogs benefitted from a home-court advantage and, starting in 1990, the tournament was moved to another location every four or so years, starting with Indian Wells, California in 1990, Notre Dame in 1994 and Los Angeles at UCLA in 1997.
Starting in 2002 with the event being staged at Texas A&M, the tournament moved more consistently to other locales such as Tulsa, Stanford, Baylor, Illinois and Wake Forest. Athens hosted NCAA tennis six times in this period, in 2003, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2017.
Starting in 2019, the new USTA National Campus in Lake Nona, Florida hosted the tournament for the first time. The USTA National Campus also hosted the event in 2021 and will again host in 2023. It has been suggested that Athens host NCAA Tennis at least once every four years, like the Open Championship in golf is always staged at historic St. Andrews on a consistent rota. However, the ZooTennis poll would suggest college tennis fans on Twitter would prefer more frequent visits to Athens. Georgia is not slated to host the event until 2026. Lewis posted her Twitter poll after contributing a story on future NCAA site locations here https://tennisrecruiting.net/article.asp?id=392898029
