Women’s tennis finishes a memorable season
Members of the UCLA women’s tennis team huddle during the 2014 NCAA women’s tennis championships. (Tim Bradbury/Daily Bruin senior staff)
By Erik Kaye
May 22, 2014 12:43 a.m.
The tennis ball flew off her North Carolina opponent’s racket just a tad too powerfully and sophomore Kyle McPhillips, along with the rest of her UCLA teammates, realized an accomplishment they’d worked for since last May.
As the team hopped fences and rushed the tennis court, tackling an ecstatic McPhillips, the Bruins won a national championship and finished off a season of grand expectations with their only acceptable result.
“My team has worked so hard they’re all so talented, I knew that they were going to fight really hard to get their points and I, honestly, had so much confidence that they were going to pull it out that I wasn’t even nervous,” said junior Robin Anderson after the championship match.
It was with this same confidence that UCLA entered the season: Five of six Bruin singles players would be back and freshman Jennifer Brady, the No. 3 national recruit, occupied the lone vacancy.
The Bruins, now with a more experienced and talented starting six, seemed poised to avoid their costly mistakes of the past and finally translate their late season slip-ups in the NCAA tournament into winning a national championship: A 4-0 loss to Florida in the 2012 finals and, most recently, losing 4-3 to Texas A&M; in the semifinals.
At the onset of the 2014 season, UCLA was touted as one of the nation’s best teams, claiming a No. 5 national ranking before the first of its dual matches ever commenced. The team’s first real test would come just five games into the season, against much tougher teams and in much more foreign an environment.
Entering the ITA Division I National Indoor Championship, UCLA stormed through its first three matches and found itself a single point away from beating Duke. After looking to start out with a perfect 9-0 on the season and earning one of the season’s best tournament victories, the Bruins were handed a loss and left with foul memories of seasons past.
Duke, rallying from an 0-3 deficit, claimed the final four singles matches and handed UCLA its first loss of the season, swindling the Indoor title from UCLA’s grasp.
It would be a taste of what would await the Bruins later in the season.
Motivated from a disappointing loss, they rattled off a 10 match victory, half of them shutouts. Steadily, UCLA rose up the national rankings with a victory over powerhouse Stanford seeing the Bruins potentially claim the Pac-12 title before a disappointing loss to California derailed the team’s bid.
That close 4-3 loss to Cal, however, was the last loss UCLA experienced this season.
The Bruins finished the regular season with a 21-2 record and firmly held the No. 1 ranking entering the NCAA tournament in search of the national title that evaded the team a year before.
Seeded fifth in the NCAA tournament draw, UCLA needed just six straight wins to propel them to the pinnacle of women’s college tennis.
One by one, those six wins piled up and culminated this past Tuesday in a dramatic 4-3 triumph earning the team a rewarding dog pile and the UCLA women’s tennis program its second-ever national title.
“Seeing the whole team grow all year, it’s just all worth it,” coach Stella Sampras Webster said at the conclusion of the final match. “They worked so hard and now they know what it’s like, it’s just a great feeling and not many get this chance, but we’ll enjoy this summer but then it’s back to work.”
The season was certainly one to remember for the Bruins. Aside from winning UCLA’s 111th national championship, Brady claimed the Pac-12 individual tennis title and as a team, the Bruins earned every doubles point in all of their 29 dual matches this season.
UCLA wasn’t exactly a perfect team, but to say anything less of them would simply be an understatement.
“This has just been the most incredible experience and the most amazing group of people to be able to share it with and I’m just so happy and just so proud,” senior Courtney Dolehide said following the national championship match.
“I don’t think I’ve work harder any other year in my career at UCLA, we had confidence in ourselves, we believed in ourselves and each other and we were a family.”
With contributing reports from Emilio Ronquillo, Bruin Sports senior staff
