May 5, 2009

By Jim Sumner
theACC.com

Duke’s pulsating 4-3 victory over Miami in this year’s ACC Women’s Tennis Championship gave the Blue Devils their first ACC title since 2003. It also brought back memories of a not-too-far-in-the-past Duke dynasty, when the school ruled ACC women’s tennis, capturing the conference crown every season from 1988 through 2001. The architect of Duke’s success was Jane Preyer, a former top-50 professional who became head coach in 1985, the third coach in Duke’s history. At that time, Clemson ruled the roost, but it didn’t take long for Preyer to take Duke to the top.

Early in her tenure Preyer won a key recruiting victory for the O’Reilly triplets from Ridgewood, N.J. Christine, Patti and Terry O’Reilly all were standout tennis players and straight-A students, who turned down traditional tennis powers like Stanford and Notre Dame to attend Duke. Current Duke coach Jamie Ashworth says the O’Reilly triplets, “put Duke on the map. Jane built the program around them.”

Patti O’Reilly was a four-time All-ACC player, a two-time All-American and the 1990 ACC Player of the Year, while her sisters also bolstered the program. The blue-chippers followed. Susan Sabo, Julie Exum, Monica Mraz, Susan Somerville, recruiting successes leading to ACC Tournament titles and NCAA Tournament bids. Duke’s first NCAA Tournament appearance was in 1988. Duke defeated Arizona before losing to Stanford. The Blue Devils advanced to the semifinals in 1992, losing 5-1 to Florida. A win or two in the NCAAs became routine.

Then Duke saw a surprising amount of coaching turnover for such a successful program. Preyer, whose father Richardson served six terms in the United States Congress, left coaching following the 1992 season for a career in public service. She currently is the Southeast Regional Director for Environmental Defense.

Preyer was replaced by Geoff McDonald. He coached for three seasons before he took the same job at Vanderbilt, where he still coaches. He was replaced by Jody Hyden, whose short stint ended when he left in the middle of the 1997 season. Senior Karen O’Sullivan said at the time, “I'm surprised. I wasn't aware of that change coming. I think that it was something that Jody felt like he needed to do, and you need to understand and respect that.”

Hyden’s departure opened the door to the stability that had long eluded the program. Assistant Coach Jamie Ashworth moved up to become the head coach. A former star at Maryland, Ashworth was in his third year as an assistant at Duke and the cupboard wasn’t exactly left bare for the new coach. After all, Duke was ranked fifth in the nation at the time he took over. The key legacy was left-handed Canadian sophomore Vanessa Webb, a player Ashworth calls, “the most accomplished player in Duke women’s tennis history. Maybe not the most talented but she did things no one had done before and no one has done since.”

How did Webb end up at Duke? “I wanted to go to a top academic school, with a strong tennis program. I knew that I wanted to play professionally but also felt that if I was going to a university, it was for the academics, so I wanted to make sure I graduated with a degree from a top school.”

Webb and Ashworth proved to be a formidable duo. Webb recalls, “I had a bit of a different game; I served and volleyed and came to the net a lot. That meant that I needed to spend time outside of team practices honing the skills I needed in order to do that. Jamie spent a lot of time with me on that that. He and I also operated on different intensity levels. I do everything at 100 miles an hour and he is more laid back. He helped me keep a calm head in pressure situations.”

Webb also gained a reputation for mental toughness. She says, “I was always an extremely focused and competitive kid. I hated to lose, even a point. And I approached every match and point with the same level of focus. In college, in particular, that helped me; I don’t think everybody came to play every match.”

Webb helped Duke reach the NCAA semifinals in 1997, where the Blue Devils fell to nemesis Stanford, the third time in a decade that Stanford had ended Duke’s season. But Duke got some payback the following year. After defeating Arkansas and Mississippi, Duke faced Stanford again in the semifinals. Webb lost at number one singles but teamed with Karen Goldstein to win at number one doubles. A win at number three doubles and a split of the singles matches gave Duke the 5-4 win and propelled the team to its first NCAA Championship match.

Florida ended Duke’s title dream, 5-1, all singles matches, two of which went to three sets. Webb still feels the sting, “Not winning the team championship is what I view as my biggest failure at Duke. I had come to the school, in part, because I wanted to help build a tradition for the school and to win its first national championship. We were close but we didn’t do it.”

But Webb had greater success in the individual singles competition. Webb advanced to the quarterfinals in 1997, before losing to Stanford’s Julie Scott in three sets. Seeded fourth, Webb got another shot against Scott the following year, in the semifinals. Scott jumped to a 3-1 lead in the first set, but Webb won 12 of the next 14 games, for a 6-3, 6-2 win.

Stanford’s Ania Bleszynski met Webb in the finals. Webb won the first set 6-3 and broke Bleszynski in the 10th game of the second set to close out the match at 6-4. Webb became the first Duke woman to win an individual NCAA title in any sport and the first woman from a conference other than the Southeastern Conference or the Pac-10 to win the individual tennis title.

Webb’s title didn’t just happen. She says, “It was a very tangible reward for a lot of hard work. I felt like I was helping Duke gain its reputation for sporting excellence, across sports. I put a lot of additional work in that year. I had someone devise an additional fitness program that I did every day because I felt that the structure of the individual-plus-team events required a particularly high level of fitness and I wanted to make sure I felt strong. I worked with a sports psychologist who helped me think through how to deal with big moments and I practiced even more outside of regular practices.”

Duke made it back to the team semifinals in 1999 but fell to Florida, again, this time, 5-2. Webb’s bid to repeat in the individual portion of the tournament ended in the third round to Georgia’s Vanessa Castellano. Webb graduated with a 159-24 record in singles. She was voted ACC Player of the Year in 1998 and 1999 and earned the 1998 female McKelvin Award winner as the ACC’s top athlete. She also won the 1999 Honda Award as the nation’s top college-women’s tennis player.

Webb represented Canada in the 2000 Olympics and played professionally, peaking at 107 in the WTA rankings. She added to her Duke degrees in Economics, Canadian Studies and French (yes, three degrees), with an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business. Webb works for the Boston-based consulting firm the Parthenon Group and is starting an office in Mumbai.

While all this was going on, the ACC slowly was catching up to Duke. Ashworth says, “There was a period when playing ACC teams hurt us. But other ACC schools saw the kind of success we were having on the national stage and began committing more resources to the sport. Those resources attracted great coaches and kept them in the league. The ACC was no longer a stepping-stone league. Coaches began to stay and build programs.”

Wake Forest was one of Duke’s toughest rivals. The Deacons advanced to the tournament finals six consecutive seasons, 1995-2000, but lost to Duke every time. Duke didn’t lose an ACC regular-season match from 1990 through 2003 but North Carolina finally ended Duke’s tournament run in 2002, winning 4-3. Duke beat North Carolina in the 2003 finals the following year.

It’s a tougher neighborhood now. Georgia Tech has become a nationally prominent program, Clemson is revitalized and new addition Miami brought additional firepower to the league. The result is what Ashworth calls, “top-to-bottom, the nation’s top women’s tennis conference.”

He’s not indulging in hyperbole. Georgia Tech captured the 2007 NCAA team title – the ACC’s first – while Miami’s Audra Cohen in 2007 and Georgia Tech’s Amanda McDowell in 2008 have won the two most recent individual titles. No one will be surprised if the ACC adds to those honors this spring. The league currently has six of the ITA’s top 20 teams, led by second-ranked Duke. That’s more than the SEC or the Pac-10. The ACC has 5 of the top 15 individuals, 12 of the top 37, and 5 of the top 20 doubles teams.

Ashworth says, an ACC dynasty like Duke put together “is not going to happen again. I can’t see anyone putting together a run like that. The competition is just too tough. We didn’t come back to the rest of the ACC, the rest of the ACC came up to our level. The goal was to beat Duke and that made the conference so much stronger and made us so much stronger.”

But Duke’s 13-year ACC-title run was built on more than just the weakness of the competition. Ashworth says, “It was bigger than the coaches, bigger than the players. The school wanted to be at the forefront and it just fed off itself.”

Webb gives a player’s perspective, “If we had afternoon matches away, the whole team would come out and practice in the morning to get ready. When new classes came in, that became ‘the way it is.’ We also tried to change the culture from one where you felt you owed it to your teammates to come prepared for matches versus having the attitude of following the rules because the coach said they had to, or breaking the rules if they felt they could get away with it. That was a big shift in mindset.”

A mindset shift that spread from Duke to the rest of the ACC, elevating women’s tennis to the position of national prominence that it now enjoys. 

Jim Sumner's articles on southern sports history have appeared in the ACC Handbook, the ACC Area Sports Journal, Blue Devil Weekly, Inside Carolina, the Wolfpacker, Baseball America, Basketball America, and other publications. His latest book, Tales From the Duke Blue Devils Hardwood, was published in 2005. In his bimonthly column "Looking Back... by Jim Sumner", he will examine the rich history of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

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