Baughman into the Semis; Eddie Herr Day 5 Recap

Deiton Baughman (USA), who has been training at IMG Bollettieri Academy recently, reached the semifinals after defeating fellow American Francis Tiafoe 6-4, 6-2. Tiafoe was the Pan American Championships champion from this past October in both singles and doubles. My claim to fame with Francis Tiafoe is that my friend Nathan Griffin and his partner defeated Tiafoe and Jordi Arconada (ARG). Nate still trains at the club I spend part of my time training at and we went to camps in our younger years together. Anyways, this is proven to be a big tournament for Deiton Baughman. I have always felt Baughman is a lot better of a player than he results show. He had a tough early round loss at this years USTA National Championships in Kalamazoo when he lost to the eventual champion Collin Altamirano in 3 sets. And with his odd, travel-conservative schedule of primarily playing tournaments in California (and now Florida since he is training here) he has had big wins and runs, but usually couldn't string it all together. Especially at the junior level. His junior career has been highlighted by a quarterfinal run at last year's Orange Bowl and a Round of 16 run at Kalamazoo in the singles in 2012. With this win, Baughman will not have to play the qualifying at the Orange Bowl, and will receive a Special Exempt bid into the main draw. Baughman was originally in the qualifying draw. But he will be looking to continue his run when he faces Russia's Andrey Rublev who is playing hot right now, riding of a win against top ranked junior American Stefan Kozlov, and a Futures title from a few weeks ago. Rublev and Baughman have been playing practice sets while training at Bollettieri in between the Futures event and Eddie Herr. Here is a video of Rublev at last year's Orange Bowl, from the ZooTennis YouTube page:

In the other semifinal, another Bollettieri student Naoki Nakagawa (JPN) will play Poland's Kamil Majchrzak. Majchrzak easily defeated China's Fajing Sun, who had a solid first 3 rounds to the tournament after only giving up 11 games through 3 matches. Nakagawa defeated Argentinian qualifier Matias Zukas 7-6, 6-3. Both Sun and Zukas are in the qualifying draw at the Orange Bowl as of right now, but considering that starts Saturday and the draws aren't released, it is unknown to me if they went straight to Plantation, FL (The Orange Bowl site) or not. Possibly they'll get a wildcard card into the event? But as Colette Lewis of Zoo Tennis pointed out to me, it is unlikely the wildcards will go out to non-Americans.

In the doubles, the 6 seeds Stefan Kozlov (USA) and Omar Jasika (AUS) clinched a spot in the finals with a 6-0, 6-4 win over Bollettieri students Stephen Madonia (USA) and Runhao Hua (CHN). In the finals, they will face the 2nd seeded team of Filippo Baldi (ITA) and Lucas Miedler (AUT). The 2 seeds defeated Zukas and fellow countryman Francisco Bahamonde in 3 sets. The doubles final will be at 9 am followed by the singles semifinals.

Full draws can be found here at: http://www.itftennis.com/juniors/tournaments/tournament/info.aspx?tournamentid=1100029444