After losing her first three games Sunday, Cristelle Grier looked hapless as she sat with a towel over her face. One day after dropping a match where she held large leads in both sets she lost, the junior seemed lost herself.
“It’s not supposed to affect you, but I really didn’t play well at all (Saturday),” said Grier, the fourth-ranked singles player in the country. “That carried on over to the first couple of games of the match today.”
But Grier, who had pulled a groin muscle earlier in the week, shook off her dreary body language for a gritty 7-6 (7-4), 7-5 win against Jennifer Zika to highlight No. 4 Northwestern’s 5-2 win against No. 5 Duke.
“I think sometimes Cristelle puts all the onus on herself to do everything,” coach Claire Pollard said. “She tries to be Superwoman out there when just being good is enough.”
The win wrapped up a 2-0 weekend for the Wildcats (9-2) against a pair of top-10 teams at the Combe Tennis Center. Northwestern also defeated No. 9 North Carolina 4-3 on Saturday.
For Grier the weekend was a tough one. In singles Saturday against North Carolina’s 37th-ranked Kendall Cline, Grier built leads of 5-2 and 5-3 in the first and third sets only to lose them both. She dropped the match 7-5, 4-6, 7-5.
“I don’t know what happened,” Grier said. “She played better, I relaxed a bit and it just got into a dogfight and I wasn’t able to pull through.”
Grier did win both of her doubles matches during the weekend with partner Audra Cohen. The No. 1 pair beat the Tar Heels’ No. 14 duo of Cline and Aniela Mojzis, 8-5, and came back to win a thriller against the Blue Devils’ Zika and Kristin Cargill.
Facing a 5-2 deficit against an unranked opponent, Grier and Cohen rallied and knotted the match at five games after a grueling game that featured five deuces, before winning 8-6.
“Claire had been talking about trying to get that energy up as a team,” Grier said. “I couldn’t hit the court to save my life and then it started clicking at 5-2, and we played steady. They were very good singles players playing on a doubles court so we just had to exploit that by playing solid doubles which we ended up doing.”
The win clinched the doubles point for the Cats, who took the momentum with them in winning four of six singles matches.
Cohen had a straight-set win against Duke’s Katie Blaszak, 6-4, 6-2. In a match where Blaszak spent as much time throwing her racket and yelling at herself as she did playing tennis, Cohen proved the tougher combatant.
“She’s a pretty emotional player,” Cohen said. “That was her biggest flaw. She put too much emotion into negative things. She carried every point with her on her back. A great player doesn’t do that.”
“You just have to play the next point because it’s over — it’s done.”
Cohen also easily dispatched North Carolina’s No. 26 Mojzis on Saturday, 6-3, 6-1. Cohen and Valerie Vladea were the only two Cats to win all of their matches during the weekend.
Vladea, who has quietly amassed an 8-2 singles record this year, defeated the Tar Heels’ Sara Anundsen, 6-3, 6-4 on Saturday and downed the Blue Devils’ No. 96 Saras Arasu 6-2, 6-4. Vladea and partner junior Jamie Peisel won both of their doubles matches this weekend.
Sophomore No. 49 Alexis Prousis won one match on the weekend. Before she defeated Duke’s Clelia Deltour, 6-1, 6-1, Prousis lost to North Carolina’s Jenna Long on Saturday 6-4, 6-4.
She also dropped both her doubles matches with teammate Kristi Roemer.
Still, Pollard said her players left the matches with the optimism that comes from two hard fought victories against top-10 opponents.
“I think still our best is yet to come,” Pollard said. “You’re not always gonna play your best tennis. The key is they understand that they’re great competitors, and that’s really what makes them so special.
“I just thought we were gritty, we were tough, and we showed a lot of guts.”
Reach David Kalan at [email protected].
