While graduate student Valerie Vladea enjoyed her team’s win over Iowa, she was thinking about her next match against her old team — Minnesota.
“Seven-zip would be a nice thing,” Vladea said.
Vladea, a three-time All-Big Ten selection as an undergraduate student at Minnesota, got her wish on Sunday as No. 2 Northwestern (17-2, 7-0 Big Ten) swept the Gophers 7-0 one day after dismantling Iowa (9-7, 3-2) by the same score.
Vladea put her own touch on the match with two wins against her former team.
She and teammate Feriel Esseghir defeated Minnesota’s Marina Bugaenco and Danielle Mousseau 8-0 in doubles, while Vladea knocked off Lindsay Risebrough 6-2, 6-2 at the four slot in singles.
Risebrough presented a challenge as she served underhand. While the ball is slower its potential movement is more difficult to predict. But Vladea handled it easily, finishing the match while half of her teammates were still closing out their first sets.
Her performance against Minnesota (5-11, 0-6) rounded out a strong weekend where she also came back from a 5-4 deficit against Iowa’s Milica Veselinovic in the second set to win the match on a marathon tiebreaker 6-0, 7-6 (12-10).
The Wildcats also had a gutsy performance this weekend from No. 3 Audra Cohen. Cohen won both of her doubles and singles matches while battling with a nagging back injury.
Cohen started slow in both of her singles matches, defeating the Hawkeyes’ Meg Racette 6-2, 6-2 and Minnesota’s Nischela Reddy 6-3, 6-3.
In spite of falling down 0-2 in the first set to Reddy, Cohen soon found her groove and had the breaks fall her way. At one point she returned a drop shot right into Reddy’s forehand, but sprinted across the net to tap Reddy’s return in for a winner.
Cohen then smiled at an assistant coach with a Michael Jordan-esque shrug.
“You’re supposed to guess either right or left,” said Cohen. “I guessed to go to the right side, and I thought that I had guessed way too early, and that she clearly had seen me. I thought she was definitely going to go down the line, and she hit it cross-court. And I was like, well, I’m right here, I might as well hit it. So I hit it and it was a winner.”
The win puts Cohen’s record at 39-4 on the year. She is one win shy of tying teammate Cristelle Grier’s school single season record.
No. 16 Grier and No. 66 Alexis Prousis both had straight-set singles victories and have each won their last ten matches. In fact, the Cats only dropped one set during the course of the weekend.
Andrea Yung lost the first set of her match against Mousseau, but rebounded to win the second set and pull out a third-set match breaker 2-6, 7-6, 1-0 (10-5).
The Cats also won the doubles point easily against both Minnesota and Iowa and have now swept the doubles point in their last seven matches.
The weekend still will be most memorable for Vladea, who didn’t play her senior year at Minnesota due to disputes with head coach Tyler Thomson.
“It’s over with and it’s done with,” said Vladea. “I’m happy to be here at Northwestern and wouldn’t trade it for the world, and I’m happy I didn’t play my fourth year there and that everything worked out for the better.”
Reach David Kalan at [email protected].
