RALEIGH - When Duke lost the doubles point to fall behind early against North Carolina at the ACC Championship final yesterday, a hush came over the women's tennis team.
Despite coming off 4-0 sweeps of N.C. State and Virginia Thursday and Saturday, its confidence had faded - a transformation that humbled, but frightened them even more. The subdued scene resembled last year's, when the Blue Devils fell back on their heels again, losing doubles and going on, in singles play, to relinquish to their most bitter rivals a 14-year stranglehold on the conference title.
"I was worried about the beginning of the singles matches and how we'd come out momentum-wise," head coach Jamie Ashworth said. "And every time we've lost the doubles point this year - which has only been twice - we've said that we want to win a singles match really quickly to take away any kind of momentum."
Katie Granson did just that, and fellow all-ACC teammates Kelly McCain and Amanda Johnson followed by putting away a pair of Tar Heels back-to-back to pump some life into the top-seeded Blue Devils and set up Julie DeRoo. The French senior slammed a backhand down the left sideline from volley at deuce to put away Kendall Cline, 6-3, 6-1, and reclaim Duke's championship in comeback fashion, 4-2, at the Middlebrook Exchange Tennis Center.
After a convincing 6-1, 6-2 win by Granson on the No. 6 court, McCain and Johnson went to battle on the first and second flights, gaining on the Tar Heels side-by-side, shot-for-shot.
McCain, who earned
Serving for the match and up 15-love in the second set at 5-2, McCain overshot her lob returns and double faulted before a serve-and-volley that pushed the score to 40-30. Another long rally on match point had Pinchbeck moaning, "Oh, my God!" on Easter and eventually returning the ball just out of bounds to give McCain her 30th win of the year.
"I did a good job of keeping my energy strong," the nation's third-ranked player said. "She was getting frustrated, and I felt like maybe I was on top of her, and she felt like she couldn't really get back into it."
Within the minute, Johnson would follow with a resounding 6-3, 6-0 pounding of UNC's Marlene Mejia nextdoor, the third time she has beaten Carolina's captain this year. Though Saras Arasu would lose on No. 3 soon thereafter as Duke let its lead slip to 3-2, DeRoo's singles match at the fourth flight took over the spotlight.
DeRoo, an ACE bandage covering her right leg from the knee up, had quietly dominated Cline all afternoon but, like McCain, couldn't finish off the point as soon as the attention turned her way. Two unforced errors in three plays let Cline, sporting a constraining wrap on her leg as well, climb back to 1-5 in the second set, but strong net play lifted one of Duke's streakier players to tournament MVP as the Blue Devils stormed court four, victorious.
"With Julie, it's believing in herself," said Ashworth, who was named ACC coach of the year as well. "She can hit her stride in a shot, and I've said that to her all year.... It's just being disciplined and hitting the right shots at the right time, and staying positive all weekend. She's the only one that finished all three matches this weekend, and that's 25 percent of our points right there. So as long as she keeps that mentality, she's great."
After falling to UNC in the ACC's last year, the team got stuck in that cloudy kind of mood, with the 4-3 loss to the Tar Heels leading to a biting fall in the NCAA round of 16 at the hands of Virginia Commonwealth. But Sunday the hushes went away, setting the Blue Devils on the right foot toward the national championships.
The NCAA's take place in No. 2 Florida's backyard - the Gators defended an early-season loss by beating Duke, 4-3, Mar. 26 - and they don't begin for 19 days - DeRoo said the team needed the time to rest, while Ashworth thought the wait was too long. But the third-ranked Blue Devils certainly exercised their demons yesterday.
"This was a really good warm-up [for Nationals]," McCain said. "It got our confidence up, and when we play Nationals, if we play Florida, I think we'll... do better than we did last time."
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