For three years, senior Doug Root always knew he had the tools.
Playing the No. 1 singles spot for Duke essentially since the day he stepped on campus as a freshman, Root always possessed the menacing serve and the crisp ground strokes, but he had never advanced past the quarterfinal round in any individual collegiate tournament.
As a result, Root still had to battle his opponent, that haunting phrase "unreached potential" and all its connotations on the tennis court.
This weekend at the Southern Collegiates in Athens, Ga., Root finally told "unreached potential" to take a hike.
Playing with the doggedness of someone who's tired of being defined as a "could be" rather than "is," the second-seeded Root rallied twice from a set down and took home his first-ever singles title as a Blue Devil by downing Mississippi's Alexander Hartman 6-2, 7-6 (7-4) in the finals.
And Root's new found secret? Two words: Staying positive.
"This summer, I worked a lot on staying positive through the tough situations in matches," Root said. "If things aren't going my way, I just kind of laugh at it a little more, and don't take it as seriously because you know it's going to turn around eventually."
After breezing through the first two rounds in straight sets, Root entangled himself in one of those tough situations in the quarterfinal match against Georgia State's Daniel Wajnberg.
Root squandered a set point in the opening frame and eventually lost the set in a tiebreaker, putting himself one set away from elimination. But the New Jersey native kept going to his serve-and-volley game and wore down Wajnberg 6-4, 7-5 in the final two stanzas.
"I learned a lot about turning situations around and keeping myself in matches," Root said. "So I felt pretty good, 'Yeah, it's just one set, I'm still in there.'"
"I was coming to the net a lot with the mentality of, 'If I just keep coming in, the guy is not going to just keep passing [me] time and time again.' Eventually, it just got tougher and tougher for him to come up with the shots."
One day later, Georgia's Matias Boeker again backed Root into a corner by taking the first set 6-4. But Root refused to buckle and took the next two sets 7-5 and 7-6, winning the deciding set via the tiebreaker, 7-5.
"He's learned a lot over the last few years," men's tennis coach Jay Lapidus said. "He went in there with a different attitude-he was much more relaxed. He put too much pressure on each match in the past; this was a much more relaxed Doug Root.
"He was relaxed enough to enjoy the battle, and he did a good job of battling back."
In Sunday's final against Hartman, Root blistered through the first set with ease, dropping only two games. But Hartman stepped up to the task in the second, going point for point with Root. With the set all square at 6-6, Root proceeded to drop the first three points of the tiebreaker.
Fittingly, Root rallied for the third and final time on the weekend, taking seven of the next eight points to put away Hartman and the whispers of "unreached potential."
Notes: Freshmen Yorke Allen and Mike Yani and juniors Marko Cerenko and Ted Rueger each won one match in the same tournament before bowing out.... The doubles teams of Allen/Yani and Cerenko/Rueger both dropped their first round match.
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