For No. 5 Duke, Saturday's match against unranked Ohio State should have been an easy win. The Blue Devils never thought the contest would come down to the final match.
With the competition tied and one match still open, Brooke Siebel and Erica Biro were fighting for their team's life. Staring straight down a 4-3 deficit and the possibility of a shocking upset, the doubles team won the next five games to take the final match 8-5.
Although their victory allowed the Blue Devils (4-1) to narrowly escape 5-4 over Ohio State (5-1), the fact that Duke allowed the Buckeyes to come so close indicated to coach Jamie Ashworth that his team needs to work harder.
"We survived the biggest scare we've had in six years," Ashworth said. "We were outplayed, outhustled. It was uninspired tennis. We got lucky [because] we had more talent. We won the match by talent.
"If we didn't have the depth that we had in our doubles, they would have beaten us. But we won because we had one more player than they did. It should not come down to 5-4 in the last match. We got outplayed from the first point of the day."
Going into doubles play, Duke and Ohio State were tied 3-3 after six individual matches, two of which went into a third set.
In the other two doubles matches, the team of Megan Miller and Hillary Adams was handily defeated 8-1. Meanwhile, Kathy Sell and Katie Granson broke away from a 5-5 tie to take their doubles match 8-5, leaving the score tied once again at 4-4 as Siebel and Biro wound down their decisive match.
Individually, Duke took two wins early on as Biro and Prim Siripipat rapidly defeated their opponents.
Siebel, Duke's lone senior, won her match as well, while Miller struggled through a loss to Ohio State's Kristi Dascoli, who is currently ranked 39th in the nation.
Adams lost her first set 3-6, but made a comeback in the second with a 7-6 win. In the critical third set, however, the Buckeyes' Michelle Matko regained her momentum and handed the freshman a 6-2 defeat to end the match. Sell, after taking a strong 6-2 lead in the first set, subsequently lost 6-3 and 7-5 in the second and third sets.
"We need to get back to playing Duke tennis," Ashworth said. "We need to get back to playing aggressive tennis, not just sitting at the baseline waiting for people to make mistakes, being tentative. We need to look to step up in the court and put pressure on people.
"In our last match-and-a-half, two matches, we haven't done that. And so in our next three days of practice-what we have before we go to national indoors-we're going dedicate ourselves to doing that."
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