Siebel leads Duke co-eds to finals

For Brooke Siebel, a welcome home turned out to be a welcome back.

The Ross, Calif., native led the combined men's and women's tennis teams into the finals of the inaugural World Team Tennis National Collegiate Championships in Palo Alto, Calif., with a series of mixed doubles victories this weekend.

Following on the heels of an unexpected flight C singles finals run at the William & Mary Invitational, it marked a career turnaround of sorts for the overlooked senior, who just two seasons ago seemed destined to be a fixture in the Duke lineup.

"I trained hard for this season this summer," Siebel said. "Just the fact that I'm a senior and have one year left means I'm giving it all I've got. I've taken some of the pressure off and played how I want to play, and results have been better."

Amid the biggest amount of pomp this side of the NCAA championships, tennis legend Billie Jean King officially kicked off the first ever co-ed national championship in tennis and the second in the NCAA-riflery is the other-on Friday.

Team tennis, the brainchild-cum-agenda of the outspoken tennis legend, employs a non-conventional scoring system. Games, which feature no-ad scoring, accumulate from a series of one-set matches: men's and women's singles and doubles and mixed doubles.

But the circus-like atmosphere and the somewhat uneven talent level-some teams failed to send their top players, while two invitees failed to participate-didn't create lax playing conditions.

"I thought going into it it was going to be all fun and there weren't many upsets of seedings, but it didn't end up being that way," Siebel said. "With the different format and it all coming down to mixed doubles, it was really competitive. All matches were a fight to the end."

And after South Carolina took the next game to tie the score and force a supertiebreaker, it looked like the Blue Devils had ungracefully worked themselves out of the finals.

But a funny thing happened on the way to an upset.

Men's assistant coach Dave Hagymas, in charge of the co-ed Duke squad, substituted Root in for Jones. The big-serving Root stemmed the South Carolina tide and almost single-handedly pushed the Blue Devils into the finals with the 7-3 tiebreak win.

"The momentum was going against us at that point," Hagymas said. "We felt that the team needed to do something different. Doug hadn't hit a ball in 40 minutes by that point, so there was a lot of pressure on him, but he came in and did a good job."

But the mixed doubles heroics ran dry a day later in the finals.

All tied up at 17 with the Aggies, Siebel and Root, this time playing in place of the increasingly ill Jones, converted just two of the 10 game points, a costly mistake in the no-ad format of team tennis.

And for Miller and Siebel, it marked a painfully familiar feeling of a just-missed national championship.

"I'm sick of getting second or third place," said Siebel, who has three times finished second in nationals and team Indoors. "But the whole tournament was in fun, so it's not as devastating, but it would've been nice to claim the first WTT championship."

Notes: The remainder of the Duke women's team travelled to Texas over the weekend to compete in the Rice Invitational. Sophomore Erica Biro reached the flight A singles final, while junior Kathy Sell lost in the semifinals and freshman Prim Siripipat fell in the flight B semifinals. Sell and Biro advanced to the flight A doubles semifinal.