Maggie CrumblissRoddy, Javadi earn top SAA honors
Tennis player Eric Roddy and another Baylor School graduate, golfer Emily Javadi, gave Sewanee a sweep of the 2016-17 SAA man of the year and woman of the year honors. In the fourth year of the conference, Sewanee has had five of the eight selections as the top all-around athletes in the league. Roddy graduated last Sunday with a 4.03 GPA as a double major in English and Spanish, and he has been a four-year All-SAA first-team player and worked throughout that time as a Bonner Leader spending a lot of hours tutoring students in the Grundy County school system. He was a Rhodes Scholar finalist and an intern last summer in New York with Scout.com, for whom he continues to serve as publisher for Miami Dolphins pages. Javadi is a three-time WGCA All-American and already a two-time Academic All-American who graduated with a biology degree and a 3.54 GPA. Playing in her fourth NCAA national tournament and ranked No. 5 in Division III, she is tied for 15th at 230 after three rounds of this year’s event in Houston. She spent a week in the spring of 2015 providing medical assistance in Haiti.
The Sewanee women's tennis team gets to avoid top-ranked Emory in an NCAA Division III regional this year. The Sewanee men have the perennial power in their path instead, but they have a tough test Saturday on Emory's courts before they even can think about the Eagles.
Coach John Shackelford's 36th-ranked Sewanee men's team (18-6) has a first-round bye and faces No. 12 Trinity University from Texas at 2 p.m. Saturday. No. 1 Emory will take on the winner of today's first-round match between North Carolina Wesleyan and Washington & Lee, and the two Saturday victors will meet Sunday in the third round for a spot in the national quarterfinals in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Coach Conchie Shackelford's 12th-ranked Sewanee women (21-5) are in a regional hosted by No. 10 Washington of St. Louis. The Tigers play today against Coe College, a 5-1 winner Thursday against Grinnell, with the expectation of facing Washington on Saturday.
Sewanee hosted a women's regional last year and edged Washington 5-4 before falling to Emory. The Tigers lost 6-3 to Washington on Feb. 12 but have won their last 14 matches and say they're a better team now. Having been ranked as high as 10th themselves, they see "Wash U" as a worthy but beatable foe.
"This is a great chance for us to get to the Elite Eight," said Sewanee senior Lindsey Liles, the Southern Athletic Association women's player of the year. "We really thought we'd be in with Emory again, so this is exciting. We're not going to lose this time.
"But it will be a tough match," Liles added. "I always say we're not going to lose."
Maggie Crumbliss from Baylor School is one of four sophomores with Liles and classmate Annie Veron in the Tigers' top six, and it was Crumbliss who gutted out the deciding singles win against Washington last year. She weathered multiple match points before prevailing.
The Sewanee men's team has three players from Baylor, and two of them - senior Eric Roddy and freshman Jack Gray - are ranked No. 2 in doubles in Division III as well as key singles starters.
"We owe a lot of our success to Chattanooga," John Shackelford said. "Our connection to Baylor and GPS and McCallie through the years has been very helpful. Sitting 50 miles from one of the hotbeds of high school tennis with such great high school coaches has been a great thing for us."
Roddy, who just got named the SAA man of the year, and Gray came to Baylor the same year - Roddy as a ninth-grader, Gray as a sixth-grader, both from CSLA - and Roddy admitted to having helped persuade his young friend to join him on Sewanee Mountain. They said they mesh well in doubles largely because of the system they learned at Baylor, and Gray - the SAA men's newcomer of the year - said he hopes to have another Baylor graduate come along to replace the just-graduated Roddy as his partner.
The team that beat those two in the USTA/ITA Small College national championship match last fall was Trinity's Adam Krull and Matt Tyer, but Krull is injured and not available this weekend. His replacement as Tyer's partner is All-American Paxton Deuel, however, and Trinity has three Division I transfers in its lineup.
Still, the Sewanee players said the secret to success would be winning doubles. Connor Winkler, the other senior besides Roddy in the regular rotation, said taking two of the three opening matches should be sufficient with Sewanee's singles strengths, but Roddy and Gray were pushing for a 3-0 doubles sweep.
Roddy plays No. 2 singles. No. 1 is junior Avery Schober, a two-time SAA player of the year who repeated on the all-league first team this year. He said Sewanee usually has the conditioning advantage when matches go extra long, because "Coach likes to run us a lot."
John Shackelford said one of the strengths of both Sewanee squads is "team cohesiveness."
"Right from the start, all year long, we've had great chemistry with both the men and the women," he said. "You practice harder and play better when the attitude and culture are like that. And the addition of Felix Mann as our associate coach has made a big difference. He was a No. 1 player at Oglethorpe in our conference and was an assistant coach at Rhodes, and then he was the head coach at Averett. We treat him every bit like a head coach, and our players really respond well to him."
The sense of community attracted players not only from nearby - Crumbliss said there a lot of similarities between Sewanee and Baylor, including the many "buildings named after the Guerrys" - but from far away. As examples, Schober is from Dallas while his doubles partner, Fletcher Kerr, is from Denver, and Winkler is from Shreveport, La.
Clementina Davila is from Mexico City - by way of Berkshire School in Massachusetts. She said when she changed her focus from NCAA Division I tennis to more balance with academics and other education aspects and applied to Division III schools, Sewanee gave her a Southern option she wanted to explore.
"It's amazing. Sewanee is very unique. I've been very happy with this choice," Davila said. "And I get to try for national championships."
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.