Dora Vastag and the rest of Indiana’s women’s tennis team spent most of Saturday afternoon watching winners whiz by them inside the Sheffield Indoor Tennis Center.
The eighth-ranked Blue Devils pounded shots past the Hoosiers for three hours on their way to a 5-2 victory.
No. 29 Indiana could do nothing to stop Duke for most of the day. The matchup turned into target practice for Katie Blaszak after Duke took the doubles point and the first two singles matches. On match point against Dora Vastag, Blaszak ran around Vastag’s serve and scorched a forehand down the line that secured Duke’s second consecutive victory over a top-30 team.
“I thought it was fitting,” Blaszak said of her shot, which she had been working on after practices. “I missed the first one of the match, and then I finished it hitting a winner off it.”
In their first match together, the Duke duo of Clelia Deltour and Parker Goyer set the tone for the day with an 8-3 victory over Dominika Walterova and Kara Zeder. Minutes later Kristin Cargill and Jennifer Zika clinched the doubles point when Cargill hit an overhead between Indiana’s Sarah Batty and Laura McGaffigan.
Indiana looked like it might find some momentum in the third doubles match, when Vastag and Brianna Williams rallied from a 5-2 deficit to tie the score at 7-7. But Blaszak and Saras Arasu stifled the comeback, winning the tiebreaker 7-4.
Heading into singles play with a 1-0 lead, Duke wanted to end the match as quickly as possible.
“Our goal in the singles was to get on top of them early in points and early in games... so we could not give them any confidence,” Ashworth said.
Deltour heeded her coach’s wishes, dismantling Williams 6-0, 6-0.
Next off the court was Cargill, who broke Cecile Perton’s serve at 5-1 in the second set and won 6-3, 6-1.
Blaszak then gave Duke the win with her 6-2, 6-3 victory over Vastag.
Although Duke dropped two of the remaining three matches, both of those losses came in tiebreakers. The tiebreakers were played to decide the split-set matches because the overall result had already been determined.
Duke took the match convincingly without the help of Jackie Carleton, who played No. 1 in both singles and doubles last week against Tennessee. She took the day off, recovering from tendonitis.
“With the National Team Indoors coming up this week, which is one of our biggest tournaments of the year, [taking Carleton out] was just kind of precautionary to make sure she’s okay to play there,” Ashworth said.
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