Auburn’s Angella Okutoyi earns emotional hometown tournament win in Nairobi, Kenya
The Auburn women's tennis senior picked up a her first W35 singles tournament win as a hometown hero in front of a hometown crowd.
Angella Okutoyi has picked up her first singles W35 tournament win, and it couldn’t have come in a more special place.
In her hometown tournament in front of cheering hometown supporters, Okutoyi defeated Italy’s Martina Colmegna 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 in the finals of the ITF’s W35 Nairobi singles bracket on Sunday in Nairobi, Kenya.
She had only the ninth-highest WTA ranking among the entrants, and she was the only Kenyan to make it out of the first round.
“I wanted to win this match so bad,” she said in part in a post-match interview posted to social media by the Kenyan Olympic team. “This match, I just told myself to go play my best and that’s what I did.”
Okutoyi soon returns to Auburn to begin the team stretch of her senior season. The Tigers host Bellarmine in non-conference play Sunday in Auburn.
A W35 is a tournament that’s part of the ITF World Tennis Tour and part of a player’s pathway to the big leagues — the WTA Tour. A W35 offers 35 rankings points to the winner, and a prize pool of $30,000. (College athletes can accept only $10,000 in prize money per year to maintain their NCAA eligibility, but can use prize money earned past that to cover travel and tournament costs.)
It was a sweet sweep for Okutoyi in Nairobi on Sunday, who also won the doubles bracket with her partner Zuzanna Pawlikowska of Poland.