UCLA men’s and women’s tennis teams will host the first two rounds of NCAA Tournament at LATC

After posting strong regular seasons, both the UCLA men’s and women’s tennis teams will get to stay home for the beginning of the NCAA Tournament.

Both teams will host matches in the first two rounds of the tournament at the Los Angeles Tennis Center. As the No. 12 team in the field, the men’s team will play Binghampton on May 13. The No. 6-seeded women’s team will play Quinnipiac on May 14.

LATC will also be the site of first-round matches between the men’s teams of Mississippi and UC Irvine and the women’s teams of San Diego and UNLV. After the second round, tournament play will move to Palo Alto.

Both UCLA teams enter the tournament with momentum on their side. The Bruin men won five of their last six matches, the lone loss coming in a hard-fought 4-3 regular season-ending loss to the rival USC Trojans.

The women won their last seven matches and took down their USC counterparts 5-2 in the regular season finale. The Pac-10 will be well represented in both fields, with five schools in the men’s bracket and seven schools in the women’s bracket.

The women’s team will be looking to go further this year than it did in the 2010 tournament, from which it made an early exit with a 4-2 loss to Duke in the round of 16.

The men were taken down by last year’s No. 1 seed Virginia in the quarterfinal round. Virginia is also the No. 1 seed in the field this year, and the Cavaliers could very well be a test the Bruins will have to get past if they want to make it to the final.

Stanford, the host school for the later rounds of the tournament, is the No. 1 seed in the women’s bracket. The Bruins lost both their matches against the Cardinal this season, falling 5-2 in Palo Alto on Feb. 5 and 6-1 at LATC on March 25.

Compiled by Vidur Malik, Bruin Sports senior staff.