Cal Upsets Northwestern 4-2; Baylor Trips Up Stanford 4-1 to Reach the Women's NCAA Final Four
©Colette Lewis 2008--
Tulsa, OK--
If you need someone to clinch your upset, you could do worse than two NCAA champions. Baylor and California both had their battle-tested veterans on the court for that final point, the one that put their schools in the Division I semifinals on Monday.
Cal's Susie Babos, the NCAA champion in 2006, fought back from a set down to defeat Maria Mosolova of Northwestern 3-6, 6-3, 6-3 to give the No. 8 Bears a 4-2 win over the top seeded Wildcats on a hot, but still remarkably calm, afternoon at the Michael Case Tennis Center.
Baylors's Zuzana Zemenova, the 2005 NCAA champion, had a slightly easier time, taking out Stanford's Hilary Barte 6-4, 6-2 to give the fifth seeded Bears a 4-1 win over the fourth seeded Cardinal.
Baylor took the doubles point at No. 2 when Taylor Ormond and Jelena Stanivuk won the final five games from Whitney Deason and Jessica Nguyen to post the 9-7 win for the Bears.
Baylor took the first set in four of the six singles, and only Lindsay Burdette's win over Jana Bielikova kept the Cardinal from being shut out.
While that match was finishing, the Northwestern-Cal singles were starting, with the Wildcats taking the doubles point with a late break and hold at No. 1 doubles.
But it didn't take Cal long to reel off three points, winning at No. 3, No. 5 and No. 6 before Northwestern had any win at all on the horizon. Wildcats Mosolova and Georgia Rose gained their first sets at No. 1 and No. 2 but Lauren Lui had to win her second set against Claire Ilcinkas to make Rose and Mosolova's win matter.
Lui did her part, breaking Ilcinkas at 5-5 and fighting off two break points with clutch winners and then holding for the set.
Rose and Mosolova were up breaks, Rose in the second set in her match with Marina Cossou, and Mosolova in the third with Babos. Rose held hers to give Northwestern a 7-5, 6-4 win, but Mosolova began to wear down, and her 3-0 lead began to slip away.
"I could see that she couldn't really keep up physically," said Babos of the freshman from Russia. "I had to work really hard for it, but finally the mistakes started coming. At 4-3, I knew I was not going to lose."
Ilcinkas had taken a 3-0 third-set lead over Lui in that battle of left-handers, and from then on, it was a race to see who would clinch the upset. Mosolova was broken at love, losing her sixth straight game, and enduring a team loss for only the second time in her freshman year.
So Monday's semifinal will be Bears vs. Bears, No. 5 vs. No. 8, indicating that parity may have arrived for women's college Division I tennis.
For complete results, visit the University of Tulsa website.
4 comments:
Woo hoo!! Roll on you Bears...Cal Bears that is! Thanks so much for the great photos and updates Colette! You do a great job and it is much appreciated. As someone who has presumably been to both the NCAA team/individual championships and the US Open, which did you enjoy more? In the NCAAs, how prevalent are supporters from the non-host school? Just curious. Keep up the great work!
So it's 5 vs. 8 and 6 vs. 7 in the semifinals. I never would've imagined the top 4 seeds would all be gone at this point. UCLA took out Arkansas pretty easily and Florida took down GaTech. I suspected the doubles point would be the difference in the UF-Tech match, because I just didn't see either team losing 4 singles matches. Florida, as they've done all year, won the doubles point and took the bottom 3 singles, pretty easily even though Revzina's match went 3 sets(it was 1 & 1 the last 2). I know the Florida girls were hoping for a rematch with UCLA, expect another epic match between those 2 who always seem to meet in the NCAA's.
Oh well, there goes my tip for the title. Now, with Georgia Tech losing to Florida you're guaranteed of a new winner in the women's bracket. However, you can't suggest that those results indicate, in any way, parity amongst the teams. Cal, Baylor, UCLA and Florida are laden with the best talent internationally and locally. If every other team in Div 1 was as capable of recruiting those players then you could suggest parity. Unfortunately, that really isn't the case here and you can't expect it ever to be.
That said, what it does do is illustrate how spectacular a job Bryan Shelton did last year to take his Georgia Tech team through to win the title. They really only had one player, Kristi Miller, of 'international' standard (blue chip is not the same thing) but were able to outperform teams who have, traditionally, been able to do their coaching at the recruiting table.
How odd. What happened to my posted comment?
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