Janus To Open NCAA Play

Lady Rebel sophomore to face Fresno State opponent in first round.

Paulina Janus will make her NCAA debut Tuesday.
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May 21, 2001

LAS VEGAS - UNLV sophomore Paulina Janus will make her NCAA Championships debut in first-round action Tuesday at the Lincoln Tennis Center in Stone Mountain, Ga.

Janus, ranked 68th, will face 41st-ranked Liesl Fichtbauer of Fresno State beginning at 6 a.m. PDT. The winner will advance to Tuesday's second round to face the winner of a match between fifth-ranked Nataly Cahana of Old Dominion and 37th-ranked Katja Kovac of Baylor.

Janus, who has not competed since April 28, is 16-7 overall and has won 10 of her last 11 matches, including six straight to end the season. Fichtbauer, a senior from Hamburg, Germany, is 32-6 overall this season while playing No. 2 singles for the Bulldogs, who were ousted in the second round of NCAA team tournament on May 13.

Janus, who transferred to UNLV this spring from Azusa Pacific, will attempt to duplicate the success of another Warsaw native, former Lady Rebel Katarina Malec, who won four matches en route to the NCAA Final Four of women's tennis a year ago in Malibu, Calif.

On the men's side, UNLV head coach Dr. Larry Easley announced that senior Nenad Zivkovic has withdrawn from the field for the NCAA Men's Singles Championship, which gets underway Wednesday in Athens, Ga. Zivkovic, who suffered through various injuries during his career, including a shoulder problem this season that forced him to serve underhanded, is unable to compete because of a foot injury that was determined by doctors to be more serious than first diagnosed.

"Nenad decided he just couldn't go," Easley said. "It's a disappointment. I know he was looking forward to giving it his best shot because it was his last shot."

Zivkovic, a native of Belgrade, Serbia, earned an automatic bid by being ranked second in his region. He would have been the first UNLV men's player to compete at the NCAA event since Asaf Tishler in 1999.

Zivkovic, the 2001 ITA Region Seven Senior Player of the Year, finished the season 17-10 and his 54-49 in his four-year career.