Mary Washington's Brandon Griffin Reaches Singles Semifinals at ITA Regional Championship
Mary Washington junior Brandon Griffin made the deepest run in the championship singles draw at the ITA Southeast Regional Championships hosted by UMW, advancing to the semifinal round before falling in a marathon three-set match.
Griffin, who entered the tournament unseeded, opened the tournament with a trio of straight-set victories to advance to the quarterfinals, where he outlasted ninth-seeded David Perez of Johns Hopkins in three sets, 3-6, 6-1, 6-3. Griffin then met another Hopkins opponent in the semifinals, top-seeded and defending regional champion Michael Buxbaum. Griffin tested Buxbaum to the limit, but ultimately fell 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-3, in a match that took three hours to complete.
UMW's David Lunding-Johansson, seeded ninth, advanced to the singles quarterfinals before falling to Buxbaum 6-2, 6-2, while fifth-seeded Stratton Gilmore also advanced to the quarters and was knocked out by eventual champion Abhishek Allah from Carnegie Mellon, 7-6 (1), 7-5.
A pair of CAC doubles teams reached the quarterfinal round - UMW's Eric Hurwitz and Nolan Perugini, and Christopher Newport's Chiraag Shetty and Steven Boslet.
After receiving a first-round bye, Shetty and Boslet defeated UMW's Max Fitsch and Patrick Hughes, 8-5, and a ninth-seeded Hopkins team, 8-2, before falling to third-seeded and eventual runner-ups Yuvraj Kumar and Daniel Levine of Carnegie Mellon, 8-5.
Hurwitz and Perugini reeled off three wins to reach the quarterfinal round. The duo opened with an 8-2 victory over Dickinson, followed by an 8-4 win over Haverford and an 8-6 victory over the fourth-seeded squad from Washington & Lee. They then fell to Nicholas Garcia and Nakul Narendran of Hopkins in the final eight.