While big emotions related to the decisive settlements of Roland Garros are right there, the other competitions start to move on. The grass season is already opened with an ITF W100 Challenger being played this week in UK's Surbiton. 32 players had set up the main draw, including three top seeds being ranked in top 100 of WTA rankings and 12 UK representatives. All of them want to make successful switch to grass surface in a goal to prepare well for the appearance on the lawns of Wimbledon championships. There are just 2,5 weeks to start of the qualies and 3,5 before the start of main draw matches of this prestigous tournament, which will be preceeded by WTA 250 and WTA 500 events in UK, Netherlands and Germany earlier in June.
Tatjana Maria is a top seed of the tournament in Surbiton and made it through the quarterfinals after two tough matches against Carole Monnet, ranked 198th in WTA list and Harriet Dart. The match between Maria and Dart was the highlight of second round, as the top seed prevailed after 2:52 hours of battle, winning it 6-4 6-7(5) 6-4. Katie Swan will be her QFs opponent after winning over Carol Zhao in straight sets in opening round and moving through the quarters after withdrawal of 7th seed Oceane Dodin.
The Brits are doing quite well in their home tournament, as 4 out of 12 participants from the UK have advanced into quarters. The world's number 209, Yuriko Lily Miyazaki will play against Isabelle Lacy. The 16 years-old Lacy has performed a huge upset over tournament's 3rd seed Madison Brengle. The young Brit, placed 852th in the rankings, managed to score her best career's win so far against an experienced American, winning 7-6(2) 5-7 6-1 in the match of first round. It's definitely the biggest upset in this tournament, out of all that happened so far, as just 2 seeds still stay in the draw at the stage of quarterfinals.
Katie Boulter is second seeded player alongside Tatjana Maria to advance into quarters. The Brit, who was already winning the matches in Wimbledon's main draw in previous years, eliminated Olivia Gadecki in first round with a dominant score 6-2 6-1 and fought back from being a set down against the fellowcountry Sonay Kartal, winning 3-6 6-3 6-4 eventually. Viktorija Golubic is Boutler's QFs opponent. The Swiss has eliminated Alison Riske Amritraj in first round. The tournament's second seed is on a roll of 8 consecutive losses. Riske waits 9 months for any singles main draw win after her run into 4th round of US Open in previous season. The American won just one match since then, during the qualies into tournament in Adelaide in January.
Yanina Vickmayer and Daria Snigur is another quarterfinals pairing. Vickmayer is the only one player who reached out the quarters without losing any single set in two fully completed matches in Surbiton this week. Vickmayer has defeated 6th seed Elizabeth Mandlik on the road, while Snigur eliminated 4th seed Kimberly Birrell in the opening round.
