The NC State club tennis team will travel to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina to compete in the United States Tennis Association (USTA) Tennis On Campus Fall Invitational for a bid to the national tournament during the weekend of fall break.

The USTA Tennis On Campus Fall Invitational will be made up of 48 coed club collegiate teams  representing colleges all over the country, including Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, the tennis team’s rival universities.

Club tennis has participated in the Fall Invitational every year and has received third place the past two times it has attended. This year, according to senior president Nate Weiner, the team is aiming to improve from the previous years and make it to the final round. 

The winner of the Fall Invitational, as well as the runner-up, will qualify to receive an automatic bid to the USTA Tennis On Campus National Championship, which will be held in the spring in Cary.

“We are definitely hungry to make it to the final this year since we have been so close to getting that National bid,” Weiner said. 

The team is coed and made up of 60 members, but not all are able to attend the USTA tournament. 

“Unfortunately, we are only allowed to bring up to 10 players on a roster since club tennis plays in World Team Tennis Format, which is a shortened match format,” Weiner said. “This year we were only allowed to bring one team, too, so we were even more limited as we have been able to bring two teams in the past.”

Besides the USTA Tennis On Campus Fall Invitational, the team attends four to five other tournaments throughout the semester, traveling up and down the East Coast. The next local tournament will the weekend of Oct. 24 in Greensboro.

Even though the team has a lot of new faces, Weiner feels the team has the talent needed to succeed this year.

“I’ve been really impressed with some of the new freshmen who came out, so I think that will be great for us in the years to come,” Weiner said.  “We also have a very deep team, especially on the guys’ side, so I’m confident that we will be bringing a really strong team and that we will do well.”

Club tennis practices three times a week from 5 to 7 p.m.  All of the matches attended are held on the weekends, no matter how far of a distance the team must travel to get there. Each match is played to six games.

Club tennis does not host tournaments here on campus, but the next time the team will have a home match will be Oct. 18 against UNC-CH.