Sekou Bangoura chasing dreams at Mardy Fish Children's Foundation Tennis Championships

VERO BEACH – For 12 years, Sekou Bangoura has traveled around the world chasing ranking points and dreams.

He has had victories over several players who have zoomed past him in the rankings and are competing in all of the major tournaments, while Bangoura has made it out of singles qualifiers in just one ATP main level tournament in Washington, D.C. in 2017, resulting in a first-round loss.

Undeterred at 30, Bangoura will attempt to eliminate his third straight teenager in his rain-delayed quarterfinal match Friday in the Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation $15,000 ITF/USTA Pro Circuit tournament at The Boulevard.

Bangoura was a promising concert pianist and chess-master, but loved tennis more. He reached a career-high 213 in 2016 but has plummeted to 569. He has won eight singles titles and 19 doubles titles on the ITF Futures Tour, but players need to get to at least 100 to get into Grand Slams and lower-tier ATP events. He was ranked 147th in doubles and reached a quarterfinal in the ATP 250 in Delray Beach in 2014.

Late Thursday, the third-seeded Bangoura needed all of his experience gained since turning pro in 2010 to pull out a come-from-behind 6-3, 6-7 (5), 6-3 victory over 16-year-old Cooper Williams, a New York native.

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Williams recently worked out with tennis greats Andy Murray and coach Ivan Lendl, a longtime Vero Beach resident, at the USTA National Campus in Orlando. Williams powerful attack had him up 3-0 in the third set before Bangoura closed out the match by winning the next six games.

“That tiebreaker was tough, but he did what he had to do to win,’’ said Bangoura, a former University of Florida standout who made the finals here in 2019. “He’s a very talented guy and I wish him good luck. It was a good match with a tough wind. I felt he had momentum. I tried to just get one point, then the next point. I got a little lucky.”

Bangoura, who had previously defeated 17-year-old Easter Bowl champion Alex Michelsen of Orange County, Calif., is scheduled to take on another teenager in Friday’s rain-delayed evening quarterfinal in 19-year-old, sixth-seeded South African Khololwam Montsi.

Montsi won his round-of-16 match when Mwentha Mbithi of Boca Raton retired with a groin injury after dropping the first set 6-2.

Bangoura has notched huge victories over talented Americans such as Tommy Paul, Reilly Opelka, Tennys Sandgren, Mackenzie McDonald and Jared Donaldson when they were younger. All have reached Top 50 or better, including Opelka, currently ranked 17th. He’s also defeated Canadian stars Denis Shapovalov (16th) and Felix Auger-Aliassime (10th) as they came up the ranks and Stefanos Tsitsipas (5th) when the Greek was just 16.

Murray tweeted out congratulations to Williams after he won his first-round match and earned his first ATP ranking point. Murray has 3.5 million followers, but Williams isn’t one of them as he doesn’t have a Twitter account.

“My mother had to show it to me,’’ laughed Williams, who lives in Boca Raton where his sister plays tennis for Saint Andrews High, while his older sister Nathalie plays for Swarthmore College (PA).

Williams, a highly ranked junior, will next head to Paris to participate in the Junior French Open. He is slated to attend Harvard University.

Just five days earlier, top-seeded Liam Draxl and his University of Kentucky teammate Millen Hurrion of Great Britain shared the heartbreak of losing the SEC championship match to the University of Florida. Ironically, Draxl, a Canadian, was beaten by Ben Shelton, who he defeated in this tournament last year on his way to the semifinals where he lost to eventual champion Jerry Shang.

Fast forward to Friday and Draxl, 20, and Hurrion, 22, are scheduled to meet in the quarterfinals. A few hours later, the second-seeded tandem will join forces as they have done at UK to play the doubles semifinal against third seeds Abraham Asaba of Ghana and Alex Knaff of Luxembourg.

Fresno’s Ethan Quinn, 18, a redshirt freshman at Georgia, and Nico Godsick, 17-year-old son of tennis great Mary Joe Fernandez, were knocked out of the doubles draw late Thursday by Nishesh Basavareddy of Carmel, Ind., and Venezuela’s Ricardo Rodriguez, who celebrated his 29th birthday.

Rodriguez and Basavareddy will take on fourth-seeded Peter Bertran of the Dominican Republic and Mbithi in the other doubles semifinal.

Quinn will play qualifier Jakub Wojcik of Delray Beach in one quarterfinal, and second-seeded John McNally is slated to play fellow American Emil Reinberg in the other.

The 360th-ranked Draxl who finished the 2021 ITF campaign with back-to-back singles titles in Cancun, downed Texas A&M standout A.J. Catanzariti, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 on Thursday. Draxl had 12 aces and converted 4-of-8 break points.

Montsi is just 5-foot-6 but his speed and racket skills honed at the Connect Sports Academy and Anthony Harris Tennis Academy in Capetown, makes up for his size. Montsi’s favorite players are Gael Monfils and Nick Kyrgios, so it’s no surprise he likes to entertain the fans with trick shots during his matches. But his true role model is his older brother Siphosothando, who last season became the first Black All-American tennis player at the University of Illinois.

“I hear many people say I watch [Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer] but I am the only person that started playing the sport not because of an actual tennis player,’’ Kholo has said. “That’s how [Siph] started and I followed in his footsteps and just wanted to do better.”

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Mardy Fish Tennis Championships: Sekou Bangoura still chasing pro dreams