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Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Tennis Teams Earn Five ITA Regional Awards
May 12, 2015 | Men's Tennis, Women's Tennis
Seniors Lindsay Graff and Zack McCourt, sophomore Tom Colautti, women's head coach Laura Granville and men's assistant coach Ryan Keckley have all been honored by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association with regional awards, the organization has announced.
Of the 168 honorees between the men and women, with seven categories of awards apiece across 12 regions, 10 were from the Ivy League and five were from Princeton. The national awards will be announced May 19, and a complete list of regional winners is available here.
Granville, in her third year at Princeton, was named the Wilson/ITA Coach of the Year for the Northeast region after taking the program to the NCAA tournament for the second straight year and coming within one team point of winning an NCAA match for the second straight year. The women rebounded from an 0-5 start to win 10 of their final 13 matches, earning the Ivy's automatic bid with a 6-1 league record that claimed the outright Ivy title and helped Granville earn Ivy League Coach of the Year honors.
Keckley, in his third year with the men's program, earned ITA Assistant Coach of the Year honors for the Northeast region three years after being named the ITA Assistant Coach of the Year for the Southwest region while at the University of San Diego. He helped end a 17-year absence from the NCAA team tournament for the men's program, assisting head coach Billy Pate in driving the team to a No. 36 national ranking entering the tournament and earning an at-large bid to the postseason. Princeton's 19 wins on the season tied for the second-most in program history, and they came over the course of a schedule that saw Princeton face 18 ITA-ranked opponents. The Tigers were ranked as high as 23rd in the nation during the season, the program's highest ranking on record since 1980.
Graff was named the ITA Most Improved Player (Senior) of the Year for the Northeast region. The Ivy Player of the Year in 2014, she earned first-team All-Ivy in both singles and doubles this year, completing a perfect 8 for 8 in All-Ivy honors in both categories through her Princeton career, including six first-team honors. Graff was 19-8 overall in singles play and 15-9 in doubles, going 14-7 and 11-8 in duals and 5-2 and 4-2 in the Ivy. She capped her season with a win over South Carolina's Elixane Lechemia, the 45th-ranked player in the nation and the highest-ranked player Graff has defeated as a Tiger.
A fellow Floridian and mechanical and aerospace engineering major like Graff, McCourt was the Northeast regional ITA Most Improved Player (Senior) of the Year for the men. As a freshman in 2011-12, McCourt was 10-10 in singles and 3-3 in doubles between the fall and spring, playing most often on court five in singles and not playing in dual matches in doubles. By his sophomore year, he boosted that to 18 singles wins, playing mostly on court two, and 35 doubles victories, playing alongside Matija Pecotic '13 as Princeton's top doubles pair and attaining a ranking as high as No. 11 in the nation as a duo. He became Princeton's top singles player as a junior, winning 22 times while remaining as part of Princeton's top doubles team, and as a senior, he won 25 singles matches while again playing on the top court in both singles and doubles. McCourt finished his career with a second straight first-team All-Ivy singles honor.
Colautti was named the ITA Player to Watch for the Northeast region. He was a second-team All-Ivy singles honoree for the second straight year, boosting his singles win total from 19 overall as a freshman last season to 28 this year while playing at No. 2 singles in both seasons. Colautti's 14 dual-match singles wins this year was second only to McCourt's 17 wins, and he and McCourt, who were ranked as high as No. 34 in the nation in doubles, each had 11 doubles wins between their various pairings over the spring and fall.
The awards cap a season that saw Princeton send both its men's and women's programs to the NCAA tournament in the same year for the first time, and each program returns four of its six singles players and five of its six doubles players from their NCAA lineups.