The Northwestern women’s tennis team has not tasted defeat in nearly two months, a stretch of 14 wins in which the Wildcats have often appeared invincible.
They handed then-No. 2 Notre Dame a 5-2 loss on April 13.
Ho-hum.
They won their ninth Big Ten title in a row.
Yawn.
They cruised through the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, beating Western Michigan and Indiana by a combined score of 8-1.
All in a day’s work.
Now comes the tricky part, the part that has tripped up the Cats in four of the last six seasons: the round of 16.
“The reality is when you get to this stage of the competition everyone is so good,” coach Claire Pollard said. “It comes down to who plays better that day.”
Last year the Cats played better than Georgia Tech in their third-round match. Much better.
They beat the Yellow Jackets 4-0, taking the doubles point and not dropping a set in singles.
Even though NU’s season ended the next day, it had cleared an important hurdle and tasted the national quarterfinals for the first time since 1987.
Senior Alexis Prousis, who was there for one of those third-round exits during her first year, said the experience has helped change the team’s mindset going into the round of 16.
It also helped that they were getting serious production from their bottom two singles spots for the whole spring season. NU players had a 42-12 record in dual matches at No. 5 and 6 last year, a huge improvement from their 24-24 mark of the year before.
And this year has been a continuation of the trend, with the bottom two singles spots posting a 42-10 record in dual matches.
“We’re going to have to get contributions from everyone to win a national championship,” Pollard said. “This is the first time in the history of the program we’ve had that.”
But NU’s strength up and down its lineup could all be thrown off-course by a pesky ball-and-socket joint.
Sophomore Georgia Rose, the Cats’ No. 1 singles player and the 13th-ranked player in the country, has been battling a sore shoulder during the latter part of the season.
Concern over the state of her injury forced her to sit out the final four matches of the regular season and the first Big Ten tournament match. Last weekend, in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, Rose trailed unranked opponents before her matches were discontinued because the Cats clinched.
The Cats have tweaked the strings on Rose’s racket to reduce the strain on her arm, but Pollard said with a nagging injury like Rose’s, there is not much to do but wait and see.
“Now we’re at the point where we’ve just got to go,” Pollard said. “You just know Georgia Rose is going to rise to the occasion.”
The Cats have gone into the tournament with an ailing superstar before. Audra Cohen, NU’s freshman phenom from 2005 who now plays for the University of Miami, battled back problems in the weeks leading up to NCAA competition.
The back didn’t seem to bother Cohen much when it came to crunch time: She won her first two matches in the tournament and took the No. 2 singles player in the country to three sets in the round of 16 of the team tournament.
She also advanced to the finals of the individual singles competition.
Rose also has the luxury of a stronger supporting cast than Cohen, one that could facilitate a deeper run even if Rose’s shoulder is acting up.
For her part, Rose said she’s doing just fine.
She said the rest helped, and even though the results were not there last weekend, she felt she was playing better tennis than in the weeks prior.
“I consider myself healthy now,” Rose said. “I definitely feel like I’m ready to go now.”
As Pollard winds down her ninth year at NU, the only thing missing from her stunning track record is a team national championship. And this deep squad could be the team to give it to her.
Prousis, who won a national championship in doubles last year, said she would not mind ending her college career by winning one for the team.
“I don’t think words can describe how that would feel,” she said.
