Tennis claims first national title
By Ajaybir Behniwal
May 20, 2008 10:45 p.m.
As she dropped her racket and collapsed to both knees, Riza Zalameda was mobbed by all of her teammates.
One year after crying tears of sadness alongside her teammates, the senior was finally able to let pour tears of joy as she clinched the team’s national championship with her 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 win over California’s Susie Babos.
“It’s like when you’re about to die and your whole life is flashing before your eyes ““ that’s exactly what happened, but it was better than dying,” Zalameda said about the moment leading up to her final overhead winning hit. “I looked over at my teammates, and I just fell to my knees.”
The NCAA Championship marks the first ever in the history of the UCLA women’s tennis team and the school’s 102nd national championship.
Exactly one year ago, after watching Georgia Tech celebrate its win in the NCAA Championships after beating UCLA 4-2, the Bruins (24-5) made it their mission to avoid what senior Alex McGoodwin called “the worst feeling ever.”
After 12 months of constant reminders of how close they had come to victory and endless hours on the courts of the Los Angeles Tennis Center, the team finally accomplished its biggest goal.
“After last year, we were so close,” sophomore Yasmin Schnack said. “We all wanted it so badly, and it finally happened.”
Schnack and McGoodwin set the tone for the Bruins by clinching the doubles point with an 8-6 victory over Cal’s Bojana Bobusic and Cristina Visico.
In the team’s first two matches of the regular season, the team that won the doubles point wound up losing the match. But the Bruins had a much more stacked lineup this time against Cal (21-6) than in either of those two prior meetings, which the teams split.
Starting off singles play, UCLA came out strong with three first-set wins on the back three courts. One of those wins, however, came in a tiebreaker as freshman Andrea Remynse looked to maintain her perfect record in NCAA Championships play.
“We came out strong in singles,” UCLA coach Stella Sampras Webster said. “We didn’t want to let them back into the match after getting momentum on our side after the doubles point.”
Even though Zalameda and Schnack both lost their respective first sets, the Bruin veterans didn’t throw in the towel, clawing their way back into their matches. Both cruised to second-set wins, as Schnack was motivated after seeing senior teammate Elizabeth Lumpkin miss a match-point opportunity and drop her second set after taking a 6-2 lead.
“They were determined to win this, and they showed it,” Sampras Webster said of her team. “They were very focused, and they’ve been here before; they’ve played in the championship before, and they knew what to expect.”
It was that experience that helped the Bruins over the hump this time around, as they showed very few signs of nerves from the get-go, unlike their show of jitters in last year’s match.
But the Bruins who returned from the 2007 team have erased those bitter memories.
“Last year we had a great run, and we were definitely underdogs,” Sampras Webster said. “This year was different because we expected to win. Our team is so deep and so strong, and our team was the team to beat, and we really believed that.”
That belief carried the Bruins through the regular season, even when they lost to opponents they felt they should have beaten and when their key players sustained major injuries.
The UCLA team knew they needed to peak at the NCAA Tournament, and they did just that, winning five of their six matches in the championships by 4-0 margins, giving up just two matches to Florida in the semifinals.
“For us to walk away with a win and a national championship, it’s really a huge accomplishment for the girls on this team, for UCLA women’s tennis and the coaches,” senior Tracy Lin said.
“It still is hard to believe even though I’m looking at the scoreboard and it says 4-0. It’s almost too good to be true, and yet I can still believe it because I knew my team could do it.”
