No. 1 women’s tennis heads north to face Cal and Stanford in final regular season games

Science was on Robin Anderson’s brain entering UCLA, but her North Campus side is starting to show. Anderson, whose favorite courses thus far are comprised of English classes, counts herself as one of two women’s tennis players who reads UCLA’s student newspaper “every single day.” No major seems necessary to validate the undeclared freshman and her Bruins’ storytelling skills, based on the narrative the team is building.

UCLA has already authored a tale that hasn’t been told in ages: The team’s 20-0 start is its best since 1987. Their plot only thickens this weekend, as No. 1 UCLA encounters perhaps the biggest obstacle in its narrative by traveling to a cold, windy and potentially rainy Bay Area for matches against No. 10 Cal today and No. 6 Stanford on Saturday.

Assistant coach Bill Zaima, who was the head coach in 1987, recognizes that the all-time series against Stanford is as crucial to women’s tennis lore as any other.

“Our real rivalry has been with Stanford. We played them more often in the Final Four and the championship matches than we have with USC,” said Zaima, whose 38 total years of coaching included losing to Stanford twice in the NCAA Championship and seeing the Cardinal hoist two other titles on his home court. The most recent championship bout took place in 2004, when current coach Stella Sampras Webster’s squad fell to Stanford 4-1.

The UCLA-Stanford rivalry includes chapters written on the recruiting trail as well.

“Back when I was (head) coaching … I had only two teams that I had to go to battle with in recruiting, and they were Florida and Stanford,” he said of the program that could very well hold UCLA’s top ranking, had it competed for and won the 2012 Indoor Championship that the Bruins claimed.

Sampras Webster expects a page-turner in Palo Alto, which hosts a raucous crowd that includes many Cardinal football players and an unprecedented intensity for college matches.

“(I told my players to) expect the worst, expect people yelling at you, so going in you know it, and so that whatever happens, you can deal with it and not freak out. Anything you can’t control ““ let it go and flush out,” she said.

Despite the storied history between UCLA and Stanford, Cal cannot be written off as simply a prologue to another clash between the Pac-12’s finest. The Golden Bears figure to be stronger than the team the Bruins squeaked by 4-3 in late February: No. 8 Jana Juricova, Cal’s top player, will play in the rematch. Cal has only lost one game with their best singles player in the lineup.

A day after playing Juricova, Anderson draws No. 3 Nicole Gibbs of Stanford. Gibbs and Juricova are older, and have longer, more storied college careers than Anderson’s, but the No. 4 player in the nation feels that she has playing against elite competition down to a science.

“I’ve been playing tennis for so long … this is just another match for me,” Anderson said.