Columbia Classic Draws Competition

As a preparation for the approaching regular season, members of the Columbia tennis team will compete with players from seven other teams located across the Northeast to win the Columbia Classic this weekend at the Dick Savitt Tennis Center.

The annual event has three draws, A, B, and C, with the A draw usually featuring the best players from the participating teams. The ranking of the players is determined by their national ranking. Teams send different numbers of players ranging from seven or eight to as little as three or four.

Most of the players have not played competitive college tennis since November, as this is when the season starts to pick up.

“It’s a tune-up for our spring matches,” head coach Bid Goswami said. “We make them play a few matches early in the season as they’ve only practiced five or six days. It gets everybody going.”

According to Goswami, this looks to be one of the stronger fields in recent memory as four Ivy League teams—Harvard, Cornell, Yale, and Columbia—are participating. Goswami said the addition of Harvard, the only Ivy team to beat Columbia last year, made the competition this year much tougher.

One question for the weekend may be whether any players come out rusty as the last time the Lions competed was at the very beginning of November in the ITA National Indoors.
Nonetheless, Goswami anticipates all of his Lions to put up a strong showing.

“The top guys are playing,” he said. “Seven out of our top eight are playing. Our expectations are that this a tournament and they know about it. It is a carrot to dangle so they work out over winter break.”

Columbia is the defending Ivy champion and for Goswani this is one of the first times he can see whether this year’s team measures up. The Lions play out of conference competition until the end of March when they start the Ivy season at Cornell.

He should also see whether his singles players are able to play with their Ivy foes as five of the six top players in the Ivy League are competing in the Classic.

“The season really doesn’t start when you play a dual match in April,” he said. “It is not when you can turn a switch on. You turn it on in December, January, February, and March and keeps on going.”

The Classic begins at 10 a.m. Friday and continues on through the weekend.