The NCAA News - News and Features

June 8, 1998

...WINNING SINGLES

Gators' quick start finishes perfect season

Top-seeded Florida's team title in the Division I Women's Tennis Championships was a singles party.

Winning five of six singles matches, the Gators clinched their third championship in seven years May 24 at Notre Dame.

Dawn Buth, M. C. White, Karen Goldstein, Whitney Laiho and Stephanie Hazlett tallied singles victories to lead the Gators to victory.

Duke's Laura Zifer was the Blue Devils' lone match winner at No. 6 singles.

The win gave Gators head coach Andy Brandi 380 career victories in his 14 seasons at the Florida helm. This year's team posted a perfect 27-0 record. Florida's last loss came to Stanford, last year's champion, in the finals of the 1997 NCAA tournament.

"We played some very tough matches today," Brandi said. "Every one of our girls played outstanding tennis today. They all gave 110 percent to win this tournament. It was a great feeling to win this against such a tough team. Duke gave us a run for our money, but we came out on top like I thought we would."

Florida won three of the singles matches in straight sets and received three-set triumphs from Buth and Hazlett in Nos. 1 and 5 singles, respectively. Hazlett clinched the crown with her victory over Duke's Kathy Sell.

"I knew if I stuck to my game plan I could win the match," Hazlett said. "I knew what I had to do to win. It was just a matter of hanging in there until I could get the momentum to go my way. I just had to be in control to win the match."

Duke coach Jamie Ashworth said her team needed to play more aggressively to beat a strong Florida team.

"All day on the matches Florida won, they played the big-ger points," she said. "They were inside the baseline on most of the points, controlling the points and putting pressure on us. We were sitting back a little and were not as aggressive as we could have been. Florida got off to a great start and had the momentum. When Laura (Zifer) won the first set, it seemed to pick everyone up, and we took some of the momentum back. But at the end of the matches, Florida's aggressive play took the momentum back."

Duke didn't go home empty-handed, though, as Vanessa Webb won the singles title. Webb is the first Duke player and the first from the Atlantic Coast Conference to win the singles event.

Webb won her title without dropping a set in six singles matches. Her final opponent, Ania Bleszynski of Stanford, had met Webb in two previous occasions with each taking a win. Webb, a junior, has a 119-22 career record, while Bleszynski ended her career with a 107-42 mark and an all-time record of 11-3 in NCAA singles play.

"It hasn't settled in yet," Webb said. "I'm still trying to recover. It (the last nine days) took a lot out of me. I think that is the hardest I've fought. I knew I wasn't playing my best. The wind was swirling and that forced me to adapt. Her (Bleszynski's) serves were bouncing high. I'm 5-11, and I was returning serves over my shoulder."

California's Amanda Augustus and Amy Jensen took first in the doubles championship by downing two-time defending champions Dawn Buth and Stephanie Nickitas of Florida, 7-5, 6-3. The victory was the Bears' first in women's tennis.

Augustus and Jensen entered the final as one of only five unseeded doubles teams to advance to the tournament finals, and they are the first unseeded players in either singles or doubles to win an NCAA championship. They ended the year with a 28-7 record.

"The main factor we were thinking about was that we had never played them before," Augustus said. "We had heard from other people and talked to the Stanford girls about how they played, but we really didn't know what to expect from them. We just tried to be really aggressive and tried to take the net away."

"We really wanted to focus on our own game and on specific things we wanted to do in the match to be able to play our style of doubles. We didn't want to think too much about what they were doing."

Florida's Buth and Nickitas were going for their third straight doubles title, a first in NCAA tennis history. Before the straight-set defeat in the finals, they had lost only three sets in three years. They complete the season with a 28-4 mark and a 91-8 career record.

"They played really well today, and they did a lot of things that we did not do," Buth said. "Jensen puts a lot of spin on the ball when she hits it, so there were balls flying everywhere, because her spin was uncontrollable. We pretty much defeated ourselves today, because we made a lot of unforced errors that really hurt us."