After Shavit Kimchi won the second set of her singles match, No. 24 Duke’s battle against Princeton was all but finished Wednesday afternoon in Orlando, Fla. The Israeli freshman’s straight-set win was the third in a row for the Blue Devils, following junior Emma Jackson and graduate student Brianna Shvets, who was facing off against her former team. These three singles matches, along with the Blue Devils smoothly capturing the doubles point, gave Duke the requisite four points to secure an eventual 7-0 victory.
Kimchi, Shvets and Jackson were the first, but not the only, team members to come out victorious Wednesday, as all six players won their matches. The result was the second victory for the Blue Devils (10-5, 3-3 in the ACC) against the Tigers this season. Earlier this year, the two teams faced off in Durham for the ITA Kickoff Weekend, a match in which Duke cruised to a 4-0 sweep. This time around was a spring break trip for the squad to Florida, and it seemed to be an even easier victory for the Blue Devils.
“We’re not in a position to overthink our opponent,” said head coach Jamie Ashworth. “We just need to go out and play and not worry about if we played that person or that team before.”
Jackson played in the No. 2 slot Wednesday, switching spots with Kimchi in the No. 1 slot. The two have swapped positions numerous times throughout the season, but Jackson suffered a straight-sets defeat in the Blue Devils’ loss to Georgia Tech over the weekend playing on court 1. Evidently the change paid dividends, as Kimchi took down Neha Velaga 6-3, 6-4 on court 1 as Jackson conceded just one total game on court 2.
“We just want to allow ourselves flexibility … we don’t want to be stagnant with our lineup at all,” Ashworth said when asked about the lineup switches.
The rest of the lineup stayed pretty steady but dominated Princeton (9-4) from start to finish. Only courts 4 and 6 — occupied by Iuliia Bryzgalova and Karolina Berankova, respectively, even made it to a third game, with Katie Codd and Shvets taking care of business on courts 3 and 5.
Duke takes nine days off before returning to ACC play next Friday at Wake Forest. That will begin a stretch of seven straight ACC matches to close out the regular season.
“Our season honestly rides on the next seven matches and the conference has been so tough over the last couple of years and it doesn't get any easier with Wake and N.C. State next week,” Ashworth said about the importance of the coming matches.
The Blue Devils currently stand in seventh place in the ACC, with both Wake Forest and N.C. State leading them in the standings, alongside North Carolina and Virginia, who they face off against later this season.
“I think this [nine-day period] gives us a good midseason break to kind of regroup,” Ashworth said, “and then we've just got to be ready to go for the last three weeks of the conference season and see what kind of position we can put ourselves in as we move forward in April and May.”
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