Four Tar Heel Men Start NCAA Singles & Doubles Play This Week

Four University of North Carolina men's tennis players will begin play this week in the NCAA Singles and Doubles Championships in Orlando, Fla.

Tar Heel graduate students Brian Cernoch and Ryan Seggerman both earned at-large invitations to the singles field. Play will begin on Monday as Seggerman will face SMU's Adam Neff at 9 a.m., while Cernoch will face Liam Draxl of Kentucky at 4:30 p.m.

Seggerman was a second-team All-Atlantic Coast Conference choice in singles in 2023, while Cernoch was a third-team singles pick.

It's Cernoch's second consecutive NCAA singles berth. He earned All-America honors in 2022 in his first year in the singles field, reaching the NCAA Round of 16. He's a three-time All-America who also owns a pair of doubles All-America performances as a Tar Heel.

Meanwhile, Seggerman and sophomore Casey Kania, Carolina's top doubles team all season and a first-team All-ACC doubles pick, were an at-large selection to the 32-team doubles field. Seggerman and Kania will play Central Florida's Lleyton Cronje and Bogdan Pavel on Tuesday.

Seggerman, a graduate transfer from Princeton in his first season as a Tar Heel, qualified for the NCAA doubles field twice for Princeton in 2019 and 2022. It's Kania's first NCAA doubles appearance.

UNC's No. 2 doubles team of Cernoch and Benjamin Kittay were the first alternate in the doubles field and earned a spot in the 32-team doubles bracket. Cernoch and Kittay will play Pepperdine's Daniel De Jonge and Tim Zeitvogel on Tuesday.

The singles and doubles competition will be conducted May 22-27 at the USTA National Campus in Orlando, Fla. This year's event will be conducted jointly with the NCAA Divisions II and III Men's and Women's Tennis Championships and hosted by the University of Central Florida and the Greater Orlando Sports Commission.

All matches will be the best-of-three sets. No-ad scoring and a seven-point tiebreaker (first to seven points, must win by two points) at six-games-all will be used for all matches. In doubles, a 10-point match tiebreaker will be played in lieu of a third set.

Automatic qualification into the Division I singles championship is awarded to any conference with one or more eligible singles players ranked in the ITA Top 125 for eligible/entered singles players. For conferences with more than one singles player within the ITA Top 125 eligible/entered singles players, the subcommittee applies the NCAA selection criteria to determine which student-athlete is the automatic qualifier from those conferences. All singles players must have a minimum of 13 started singles matches, with six matches in the spring, in order to be selected as an automatic qualifier or an at-large selection.

Automatic qualification into the Division I doubles championship is awarded to any conference with one or more eligible doubles teams ranked in the ITA Top 60 for eligible/entered doubles teams. For conferences with more than one doubles team within the ITA Top 60 eligible/entered doubles teams, the subcommittee applies the NCAA selection criteria to determine which doubles team is the automatic qualifier from those conferences. All doubles teams must have started a minimum of 10 doubles matches, with a minimum of four matches in the spring, in order to be selected as an automatic qualifier or an at-large selection.

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Players Mentioned

Brian Cernoch

Casey Kania

Benjamin Kittay

Ryan Seggerman

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University of North Carolina Athletics