CHAPEL HILL - In its history, the Atlantic Coast Conference Women's Indoor Tennis Tournament has always been exciting for the conference's coaches. It means that someone from a school other than Duke always wins.
Even though the No. 3 ranked Duke women's tennis team has won nine consecutive ACC crowns at the postseason team tournament, one of its players has never won the Indoors-an event scored individually. This year, things changed.
The Blue Devils' failure to place one of their members atop the leader board at the Indoors may have something to do with the fact that Duke's top players generally never play in the tournament. NCAA rules permit a specified number of tournaments that each player can enter, so Duke has historically withheld its top two seeds in order to enter them in another individual tournament, the Rolex Championships.
This year was no exception, as the nation's No. 1 and No. 9 players, sophomore Vanessa Webb and freshman Karin Miller, respectively, did not suit up for the tournament held at North Carolina's tennis center. The Blue Devils were even further handicapped in their quest for a title by the absence of sophomore Kristin Sanderson. Sanderson, an All-ACC selection as a freshman, sprained her ankle last week and was not able to play at the Indoors.
But this Duke team is not exactly like the previous nine squads that has so thoroughly dominated the conference. With more depth than the Mariana's Trench, the Blue Devils are better than their predecessors.
"We're one of the best teams in the country," head coach Jody Hyden said. "We've never won this tournament, and I wanted to win it. I told the team that we should have somebody win it."
The singles competition opened on Friday with five of Duke's eight entrants earning first round byes. Florida State's Lori Sowell received the No. 1 seed in the draw, but Blue Devil seniors Diana Spadea, Wendy Fix, Karen O' Sullivan and Luanne Spadea filled out the rest of the top five seedings.
"This is a good tournament for us," Hyden said. "They created this tournament a couple of years to give all of the teams a chance to play before the regular season begins."
By the fourth round of singles competition, Duke's four seniors composed half of the field, while no other team could muster more than one entrant. Luanne Spadea advanced to the finals when she knocked off Virginia's Paige Boiko. After Spadea cruised through the first set 6-1, Boiko bounced back, winning the second set decisively, 6-2. Spadea finished off the smaller, quicker Boiko, 6-2 in the third.
In the finals Spadea met her teammate Fix, who had defeated Wake Forest's Cristina Caparis 6-4, 7-6 (10-8). Fix had Caparis on the ropes 6-2 in the tie breaker before Fix began taking low-percentage shots that found the net instead of the line.
"I didn't play intelligently," Fix said. "I started trying things that I wasn't doing the entire match. I decided to go back to the way that got me to match point-controlled aggression... If I had lost the second set, it would have been tougher emotionally than physically. I wanted to win in the second, so I would not let down."
After fending off Caparis' set point at 6-7, Fix won the match 10-8 in the tie breaker of the second set. On Monday, Fix and Luanne Spadea squared off for the championship in their own version of a Duke practice. Fix defeated her classmate, 6-4, 6-0, to earn Duke its goal of an individual champion at the Indoors.
In the doubles competition, Duke was not quite as successful, as the other teams' top players eventually wore down the Blue Devils over the four-day tournament. Blue Devil teams Luanne Spadea/O'Sullivan, Ellen McCance/Brooke Siebel and Diana Spadea/Fix all lost in the third round.
"I thought our performance was very good," Hyden said. "I was more pleased with how hard we played than I was with our shot making. We just fought really hard."
The Blue Devils traveled down 15-501 in order to obtain some competition for the upcoming season, which they did. But they also justified a No. 3 ranking by giving the tennis world a glimpse of the depth of this year's Blue Devils.
As for the other teams in the conference, all good things must come to an end.
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