UCLA seniors Tracy Lin and Riza Zalameda added another title to what has been a dream finish to their Bruin careers.
A week after leading the UCLA women’s tennis team to its first-ever NCAA title, Lin and Zalameda won the NCAA doubles title with a 6-2, 4-6, 6-3 defeat of Fresno State’s Melanie Gloria and Tinesta Rowe on Monday in Tulsa, Okla.
“It’s a great feeling just to win a title like this, but I feel like last week was a little more intense because last week was the team,” Zalameda said. “The team was incredible with winning not just for us, but also for other people.”
Lin and Zalameda entered the doubles tournament, which started on Thursday, as the No. 1 overall seed.
They cruised through the draw without dropping a single set until the championship match, when Gloria and Rowe provided a significant challenge.
“They were a good team,” Lin said. “Rowe is extremely aggressive at the net. They were the only team to take a set from us the entire tournament. In the third set, we were fortunate enough to get an early break and stayed on top of them.
“Things just went our way today.”
For coach Stella Sampras Webster, who won a doubles title with Allyson Cooper while at UCLA in 1988, Lin and Zalameda were a perfect match.
“They both have a ton of respect for each other on and off the court,” Sampras Webster said. “They work really well together. … Both of them together just worked, and I can’t take any credit because they had to do it.”
Lin and Zalameda beat Fresno State teams in both their final and semifinal matches.
In the semifinal the win wasn’t as hard-fought though, as the Bruin team beat Fresno State’s Renata Kucerkova and Anastasia Petukhova 6-2, 6-1.
The win Monday was the final match of Lin and Zalameda’s UCLA careers. Both have earned All-American honors while at UCLA.
Now Lin and Zalameda will return from Tulsa with two national championships.
“We’ve been playing for two weeks, and our shots are pretty refined,” Zalameda said. “All we had to do was execute. We knew they were a great team because I saw them earlier this year, and we were expecting them to come out big. They did come out big on certain points, but we just toughed it out.
“We had more experience, more skill today and more will, but they were a great team.”