When it came down to just a senior and a prayer, Doug Root decided that praying just took too damn long.
With an extra tug on his trademark backwards baseball cap and a fist pump four years in waiting, the Koming, N.J., senior rallied back from a 6-5 third set deficit to pick up a 5-7, 6-2, 7-6 (7-5) victory at No. 1 singles. Root's decisive win staved off an inspired South Carolina team, 4-3, just hours after graduation exercises Sunday.
"I knew South Carolina was a dangerous team and that this would be a tough match," said an exhausted Jay Lapidus, coach of the No. 5 Blue Devils. "They showed up to play. It was vastly different from what I expected.... If they fought that hard all season, they're a top-10 team."
The Gamecocks entered the tournament as the nation's 42-ranked team, following a disappointing regular season that saw coach Kent DeMars rotate injured players out of the lineup on a regular basis.
But on Sunday, neither injury nor heat nor exhaustion seemed like it would derail the South Carolina express before it upset the Blue Devils.
And for Root, the situation was all too familiar.
A year ago, he battled for his team's tournament life at No. 2 singles in
And once again Sunday, it came down to Root.
But this time, nothing was going to keep him from advancing his team to the round of 16 in Athens, Ga.
After trailing 3-0 early in the third set, the hard-serving Root rallied to take a 5-4 lead, up a break and serving for the match despite having little success with his first serves.
And after squandering a match point and faulting his first serve at deuce, Root received a game penalty for verbal abuse, a call that stunned both Root and Lapidus, who visited the chair umpire to challenge the call.
South Carolina's Robert Steckley quickly took advantage of the shift in momentum, holding serve to go up 6-5.
But the Blue Devil captain rallied to hold serve and force a deciding tiebreaker, in which he immediately raced to a 6-1 lead. But a series of errors let Steckley back in the match and on serve at 6-5 in the breaker.
And that's when Doug Root decided enough was enough.
Root drilled his return of serve deep to Steckley's backhand and then hammered the short reply into the back corner of the court, greeting the winning shot with a fist-pump and a yelp.
"Doug did an unbelievable job under pressure. His maturity as a senior showed up," Lapidus said. "Ninety-nine percent of players would have folded in that situation, but Doug stuck with it and delivered."
The Blue Devils nearly had the match under wraps at No. 4 singles, as Andres Pedroso-who had won at No. 1 against South Carolina in the two teams' regular season meeting-jumped out to a 3-0 advantage in the third set.
But South Carolina's Seth Rose, winner of 12 of his previous 13 matches, rallied back to win the next six games and pull the Gamecocks to within a point at 3-2.
"[No. 4 singles] was the key match," DeMars said. "If we could take that one, I felt like we could win the match."
And with the two remaining matches both at 3-2 scores in favor of South Carolina, the Gamecocks couldn't have been in a better situation.
Despite an inspired performance at No. 2 singles-a match which was as acrobatic as it was energetic-junior Ramsey Smith couldn't pull out the point for Duke, falling 6-2 in the third and leaving Duke with little more than a prayer and a senior to rely on.
And the senior pulled it out.
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