URBANA — While almost 90 Uni students missed school today due to illness, two others were not present for a completely different reason.

Freshmen Alex Mestre and Edo Roth left today for Mobile, Ala., where they will be participating in the 14 and under advanced division of the U.S. Tennis Association National Championships from Friday to Sunday. Mestre is currently ranked No. 1 in boys 14 and under in Middle Illinois.

The USTA provides a Junior Team Tennis Program in which players of ages 5 to 18 and all skill levels form teams and play in leagues across the country. Leagues consist of two or more teams, and matches are held within each league.

Mestre and Roth are part of a seven-person team from the Champaign-Urbana and Bloomington area. The other five members are Austin Aten (Judah Christian), Allison Hansen (Centennial), Amanda Studnicki (Bloomington), Sam Totten (Bloomington), and Lauren Yoder (Bloomington).

The team is coached by Joe Totten from the Bloomington Evergreen Racquet Club, but Mestre and Roth do most of their training with the instructional staff at the Atkins Tennis Center on the University of Illinois campus.

In August, the team won the Midwest Championship tournament in Indianapolis, after qualifying for the tournament as the top team in their league. The Midwest title qualified them for the national competition.

So how have they been preparing for nationals?

“We've mostly just been doing normal practices at Atkins,” says Roth, “and playing with each other with an emphasis on doubles since we're going to need to do a lot of that over the weekend.”

Each team match at the tournament will consist of a boys singles match, a boys doubles match, a girls singles match, a girls doubles match, and a mixed doubles match where the doubles teams consist of one boy and one girl.

All matches will be scored using a three-set system, where the first player or doubles team to win two sets wins the match. Each set consists of six games with a 12 point tiebreaker at 5-5. The team that wins the most individual matches wins the overall match.

Playing against 15 other top teams in the nation and winning will not be an easy task for the Midwest champions, but they are definitely up to the challenge.

“I don't think we're expecting too much, but we're just going to try to do the best we can and hopefully win the title,” says Roth. “I think it will be a very fun experience, no matter the outcome.”