It couldn’t have started any better for the UCLA
women’s tennis team on Thursday evening, and it
couldn’t have ended any worse.
The Bruins, having won the doubles point and the first two
singles matches, needed only one more victory to defeat crosstown
rival USC and move into the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament.
That all-important fourth point never came.
Instead UCLA unraveled over the final four singles matches,
losing an agonizing 4-3 battle and any hope of making another
magical postseason run.
“We just let this one slip away,” UCLA coach Stella
Sampras Webster said. “We had plenty of opportunities to win
but we just couldn’t get it done.”
Having won 10 of its last 11 matches, including a 5-2 victory
over the Trojans in the regular season finale, 10th-seeded UCLA had
hoped to return to the NCAA Finals for the second consecutive
season.
And after Laura Gordon gave the Bruins (17-6) their third point
on Court 6, they appeared to be taking their first step.
But over the course of the next two hours USC slowly turned the
momentum before breaking UCLA’s spirit in three decisive
third sets.
First Alex McGoodwin missed an opportunity to close out the
match in a second-set tiebreaker, before self-destructing in the
third set, falling 6-0. Then Tracy Lin, who was two games away from
clinching a UCLA win, lost eight of the final 10 games to knot the
match at 3-3.
That left it up to senior Sarah Gregg, who had battled back to
win a second-set tiebreaker on Court 4 against USC’s Dianne
Matias to force a third set.
Gregg, who has been hampered by an ailing wrist all season,
fared no better than McGoodwin or Lin in her third set, falling
behind 3-0 before losing 6-3.
“It was a real gutsy performance, especially by
Dianne,” USC coach Richard Gallien said. “She was
cramping up, so she wanted to come to the net more and shorten the
points. A lot of guts to pull it off.”
It was UCLA’s first loss to USC in four postseason
meetings, and it cast a pall over what the Bruins accomplished with
their strong regular season finish.
Only top-ranked Stanford had been playing more consistent tennis
than the Bruins, who hadn’t yielded more than two points to
any opponent except the Cardinal since March 9.
One of the major reasons for UCLA’s success was sophomore
Daniela Bercek, and she was spectacular again against the
Trojans.
Bercek was the first Bruin off the court, registering a 6-3, 6-2
victory over USC’s Nicole Leimbach on Court 1.
But Bercek could only be a spectator during the Bruin
collapse.
Next to her on Court 2, freshman Riza Zalameda had taken her
high school rival Lindsey Nelson to a first-set tiebreak, but lost
it and five of the first seven games in the second set en route to
a 7-6, 6-4 loss.
It was the third time this season that Zalameda lost to Nelson,
who fell to Zalameda in the CIF finals last year.
“No one on our team panicked,” Gallien said.
“They just stayed the course. We had to get a little lucky
sometimes too.”
With the victory, the Trojans (19-3) advance to the NCAA
Quarterfinals, where they will face second-seeded Florida, a 4-2
winner over No. 15 Baylor, on Thursday evening.
The Bruins, on the other hand, will return home to Westwood,
their dreams of capturing the program’s first NCAA title
shattered for another year.
“You have to give a lot of credit to USC,” Sampras
Webster said. “They never stopped. They hung in there the
whole time and made us play and try to earn it.”
Instead, UCLA, which had come so close to earning it, just gave
it away.