Six women’s tennis players kicked off their 2019 seasons this weekend at the Rice Invitational in Houston, Texas.

After rain washed out all the matches on Friday, all of the action started on Saturday. Each singles draw featured two Alabama players; senior Alba Cortina Pou and junior Moka Ito defeated opponents ranked No. 55 and No. 53 nationally. Both players had one win over nationally ranked opponents last season.

In the second round, both players fell in straight sets.

Freshmen Isabella Harvison and Ares Teixido, competing in the Flight 2 Singles Draw, both lost their first-round matches. Harvison earned her first career win later in the day with a 6-1, 6-0 victory. Teixido dropped her second match, 6-3, 6-1.

In the Flight 3 Singles Draw, senior Ann Selim had the best Saturday among the Alabama players with two wins by tiebreaks. Senior Luca Fabian was also in the draw and lost her first-round matchup, 7-5, 6-2. Fabian picked up a 6-2, 6-1 win in her second match.

In Saturday’s doubles action, Ito and Harvison won handily, 6-1, in the Flight 1 Doubles Draw. The Flight 2 Doubles Draw featured two Alabama pairs. Fabian and Selim won 6-3 while Cortina Pou and Teixido lost 6-3.

Alabama swept all three of its doubles matches on Sunday. The duo of Ito and Harvison defeated the No. 11-ranked pair from Arkansas, 7-5. Cortina Pou and Teixido won in a tiebreak and Fabian and Selim won 6-2.

Alabama’s next tournament will be the ITA All-American Championships in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The tournament is set to go from Oct. 5-13.

On the men’s side, seniors Zhe Zhou and Alexey Nesterov traveled to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for the Southern Miss Invitational this weekend for the two-day tournament.

On Saturday, Zhou and Nesterov opened the tournament on a strong note by earning a first-round doubles win over Wang/Peres of Southern Miss, 8-3.

In singles play, Zhou won his opening match 6-4, 6-2 but dropped his second match 6-1, 6-0. Nesterov dropped his first singles match of the year in the first round but bounced back with a 7-6(4), 6-2 win to close out play on Saturday for Alabama.

Zhou and Nesterov continued their strong doubles performance on Sunday, defeating New Orleans’ Klein/Fomenkov, 8-6. The best win of the weekend for the pair came in their final doubles matchup of the tournament: an 8-3 victory over the No. 37-ranked team. Nesterov is now 6-0 in doubles competition and Zhou is 5-1.

Both players won their singles matches on Sunday to complete a four-match sweep.

The next tournament on tap for the men’s team is the Samford Fall Invite hosted in Birmingham, Alabama, from Oct. 4-6. The players participating in the tournament will be announced later this week.