BATON ROUGE — The 25th-ranked LSU women’s tennis team heads to Athens, Ga., on Tuesday to face the defending national champion Georgia Lady Bulldogs at 2 p.m. (Central time) on the campus of the University of Georgia.
“Georgia has a phenomenal team this season,” said LSU head coach Tony Minnis. “They are a very tough team to play anywhere, but I think that they are especially difficult to play when they are at home. We need to take their crowd out of the match by starting off strong in the doublescompetition, and then if we play tough in the singles round, we’ll have achance.”
LSU enters the annual-conference match versus Georgia with an overall record of 10-4 and a 2-3 mark versus Southeastern Conference opponents. The Lady Tigers dropped their most-recent match of the season to the 15th-ranked Tennessee Volunteers on Sunday. The 6-1 loss snapped LSU’s two-match winning streak and proved to be the Lady Tigers’ third-straight conference defeat.
Georgia, the second-ranked team in the nation, possesses a 9-1 overall record and a perfect 3-0 record in SEC play. The Lady Bulldogs are undefeated at home in the Dan Magill Tennis Complex and have recorded a 4-0 mark in Athens, Ga., this season. Georgia’s lone loss of the season was a 4-3 defeat at the hands of top-ranked Stanford in the championship match of the ITA Indoor Team Championships.
Last season, the Lady Bulldogs came to Baton Rouge as the third-ranked team in the nation and earned a 6-3 victory over the LSU women’s team. Georgia’s win improved its decisive lead in the all-time series between the schools to 22-1 and also extended its winning streak versus the Lady Tigers to 17-straight matches. LSU’s only victory of all-time over the Lady Bulldogs was a 6-3 win at home in 1985.
Bruna Colosio, the Lady Tigers’ 43rd-ranked junior from Cascaval, Brazil, heads into Tuesday’s SEC contest as the team’s lone-ranked singles player and an integral part of LSU’s 20th-ranked doubles team. When teamed up with freshman Rocio Fantilli, Colosio has helped the doubles pair record 11 wins in 12 matches and accumulate three victories over ranked opponents.
The Lady Bulldogs currently have six-singles players ranked among the nation’s top 75. Leading the way for Georgia is No. 10 Aarthi Venkatesan and No. 52 Agata Cioroch. Both Venkatesan and Cioroch are undefeated this season in singles play and have accumulated 4-0 and 7-0 overall records, respectively. The Lady Bulldogs also boast the services of No. 28 Anne Nguyen, No. 51 Mariel Verban, No. 55 Tina Hojnik and the 61st-ranked Lori Grey.
Georgia’s doubles combination of Grey and Venkatesan forms the sixth-ranked tandem in the nation. The pair has compiled a 5-0 dual-match record this season.
The 25th-ranked LSU women’s tennis team travels to face the second-ranked Georgia Lady Bulldogs on Tuesday at 2 p.m. in an SEC contest at the Dan Magill Tennis Complex in Athens, Ga.