Wednesday, May 03, 2006

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (May 3, 2006) - The ETSU women's tennis team is headed to Nashville where it will face No. 12 Vanderbilt next Friday, May 12 in the first round of the 2006 NCAA Championship. Match time is still to be determined.

The Lady Bucs had a crowd on hand Wednesday night in the East Tennessee Room of the D.P. Culp Center as the selection show aired live on ESPNews.

It was a special night for senior Sylwia Ziolkowska (Warsaw, Poland) who has seen the team progress year after year. "I am really excited, I think we can do it and I think we are ready. This is really special, it was always my dream to get into the NCAAs and right now I just can't believe it. This is my last chance to go out and do whatever I can and I want to go out and do it."

For senior Sandie Knight (Adamstown, Australia), it was also a night of where dreams were realized. "The most exciting thing for me is that this happened during my senior year. One of the goals that I had when I came into this school was to get into the NCAAs. I don't know much about Vanderbilt, I've never seem them play. I guess that's a good thing we don't have these ideas in our minds of how good they are. I think that's probably a positive thing."

Head Coach Steve Brooks felt positive about the Lady Bucs drawing Vanderbilt in the first round. "Obviously Vandy is a great team and a very established program, their coach Geoff MacDonald is a fantastic coach, good recruiter, good motivator. We've got a tough challenge ahead of us; the good thing is that we have several more days of practice before we go. We just need to take it day by day like we do everyday and we need to treat this match like every other match. We're doing everything the exact same way as we did when we were 1-21, but hard work pays off and we just have to work harder than everybody else," said Brooks.

The Lady Bucs (23-4) earned an automatic bid to the tournament by winning its first ever Atlantic-Sun Conference Tournament Championship back on April 15, while the Lady Commodores (21-4), who are currently ranked No. 12 in the ITA poll, was defeated by the Kentucky Wildcats during the semifinals of the SEC Conference Tournament on April 22.