Cal Opens Season At Battle In The Bay

BERKELEY – The California men's tennis team starts the 2021-22 season at the Battle in the Bay Classic that runs Thursday through Sunday at the California Tennis Club in San Francisco. The annual tournament, hosted by the University of San Francisco, will feature four Golden Bears: Yuta Kikuchi, Philip Hjorth, Lucas Magnaudet and Carl Emil Overbeck.
 
In the opening round of 32 in the singles main draw on Thursday, Hjorth will take on Arizona's Jonas Ziverts at 11:30 a.m., and at 12:45 p.m. Kikuchi will face Evin McDonald of Texas, while Overbeck will play Oklahoma's Mason Beiler. Hjorth defeated San Diego's Will Davies, 6-3, 6-3, in Wednesday's qualifying singles to advance to the main draw.
 
Doubles qualifying will take place Thursday morning, with the duo of Magnaudet and Hjorth vying with Arizona State's Nicola Signa and Fabien Salle at 9 a.m. for a spot in the main draw.
 
In the opening round of 16 in the doubles main draw, the pair of Kikuchi and Overbeck is scheduled to face opponents TBA at 10 a.m. on Thursday.
 
Here are the links to the main draws:
Singles
Doubles
 
RadioTennis.com will broadcast from the tournament. Please click here to access the coverage.
 
Scouting the Bears

• Senior Yuta Kikuchi is ranked 124th in the ITA preseason singles poll.
• The Cal star reached the Battle in the Bay singles quarterfinals in 2019 (see below) and got to the round of 16 in 2018.
• Kikuchi – a qualifying singles alternate in the ITA All-American Championships – earned an invitation to the singles prequalifying tournament at the All-American.
• Cal alumna and two-time NCAA champion Amanda Augustus, who also leads the Cal women's tennis team, is in her first season as Cal's interim director of tennis.
• Francis Sargeant is in his first season as a Cal assistant coach, after coaching as an assistant at Stanford in 2020-21. The England native played at BYU from 2012-15, ending his collegiate career with 91 singles wins.

New Faces
Cal Emil Overbeck, Alex Chang and Michael Wright are the newest additions to the Cal squad.
 
The 6-3 Overbeck, who hails from Copenhagen, Denmark, is an internationally experienced player who has a career-best ITF junior combined ranking of 250. He is ranked sixth in Denmark among senior men's players.
 
Chang and Wright, the son of the retired Peter Wright, are Berkeley High School products. Chang was ranked as high as the 26th-best recruit in the nation by TennisRecriting.net and as the ninth-best recruit from the state of California. Michael Wright follows in the footsteps of his older brother, former Bear Thomas Wright, in joining the Blue & Gold.
 
Last Time At Battle in the Bay
Yuta Kikuchi advanced to the 2019 Battle in the Bay Classic singles round of 16 on Sept. 21, with the 75th-ranked Cal sophomore beating USC's Ryder Jackson, 2-6, 6-2, 6-4, at the California Tennis Club. But the tournament's seventh seed lost in the quarterfinals later in the day to Michigan's second-seeded Ondrej Styler, 6-4, 7-5.
 
Cal's Kent Hunter and Mert Zincirli played consolation singles on the tournament's final day, with Hunter falling to San Diego's Sacchitt Sharrma, 3-6, 6-3, 1-0(8), and Zincirli losing to Boston College's Derek Austin, 5-7, 6-2, 1-0(8), in the round of 32. In an extra doubles match, Cal's pair of Kikuchi and Hunter knocked off San Francisco's Johan Garpered and David Woodland, 8-7(5).
 
Next Time
Cal competes in the Chowderfest – the annual Harvard tournament – from Sept. 24-26 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.