USTA 18, 16 Nationals to be held as scheduled

Katie Volynets of Walnut Creek in the San Francisco
Bay Area poses after winning the USTA Girls 18 Nat-
ional Championships last August in San Diego. Photo
courtesy of JFS Communications

   The USTA Boys and Girls 18 and 16 National Championships will be held Aug. 7-16 as scheduled, the organization announced today.
   However, the boys and girls 14s and 12s have been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
   The boys and girls 18s will be held at their traditional locations of Kalamazoo, Mich., and San Diego, respectively. But the boys 16s will move from Kalamazoo to Mobile, Ala., and the girls 16s will switch from San Diego to Rome, Ga.
   The singles draws for each tournament will be reduced from 224 players to 128. Information regarding the doubles competitions will be announced later.
   Face masks will be required for everyone except on-court players and officials, according to the USTA. Players will be limited to one guest, and there will be no additional spectators.
   College coaches will not be permitted to attend the tournaments, but the USTA is "working on making additional resources available" for remote recruiting, a spokesman said.
   Four Northern Californians have won the 18 singles title in the past seven years. Boys champions include Collin Altamirano (2013) of Sacramento and Jenson Brooksby (2018) of Carmichael in the Sacramento region. Among the girls winners are CiCi Bellis (2014) of Atherton in the San Francisco Bay Area and Katie Volynets (2019) of Walnut Creek in the Bay Area.
   All except Brooksby, a freshman at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, play professionally. All except Bellis, who's based at the USTA National Campus in the Orlando, Fla., area, train at the JMG Tennis Academy in Sacramento.