NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – The second-seeded Christopher Newport women's tennis team raced past third-seeded Salisbury in the Capital Athletic Conference Semifinals Wednesday, winning 9-0 to advance to the CAC Championship. The Captains swept doubles play and got two quick singles wins to earn their first ever trip to the conference final.
CNU improved to 14-5 on the season while Salisbury concludes their season with a 13-7 mark. The Captains will play in the championship on Sunday, April 26, against the at top-seeded and 20th-ranked Mary Washington.
Coming into the match, Salisbury had lost just 13 total doubles matches this season, in 57 total opportunities. Their 77.2% win percentage in pairs play was a league-best, and the Sea Gulls had swept the Captains in last week's regular season finale. This time around, CNU got the better of their conference foes, returning the favor via a doubles sweep.
First, at No. 3 doubles, the Captains rookie pairing of
Kate Huck and
Kristi Wong took control of their match early. Last week, the CNU tandem suffered a tight loss, 8-6, to Allison Lutz and Megan Soderlund, but this time, ran away with an 8-2 win to get CNU on the board first.
The next match to finish up came at No. 2 doubles, where CNU sophomores
Logan Eldridge and
Katie Carlson were locked in another tight match with Claudia Lohn and Charlotte Walker. CNU took an early 2-1 lead and held the edge over the next several points to a 4-3 edge. They would then win the next three points to take a 7-3 lead. Salisbury held to make it 7-4, but the second-year pairing for CNU closed out the win on their next serve, 8-4.
At No. 1 doubles, the highly-anticipated rematch of the regionally-ranked top tandems was, as expected, hotly contested. After falling to the 12
th-ranked Salisbury pairing of Natalie Savage and Katie Youlios last week, CNU's rookie pairing of
McKinney Harwood and
Alexandra Drye, ranked 14
th in the Atlantic South, controlled the match early, taking a 3-1 lead. Salisbury's top group battled back to within one, but Harwood and Drye kept them at bay and locked up the doubles sweep with an 8-6 win.
Huck pulled the Captains within one team point of the match when she raced past Soderlund in No. 4 singles, 6-1, 6-1. CNU took a one-set lead in all five of the other matches, including Harwood over Savage in a regionally-ranked showdown. Before anyone else could finish though, it was the veteran in the lineup,
Katie Carlson, who sealed the win. Carlson, the lone second-year player in CNU's singles lineup, defeated Lohn by a 6-2, 6-1 final.
The teams would play out the remaining four matches, as Drye finished up next, capturing a 6-0, 3-6, 1-0 (10-5) win over Youlios at number two. After a hard-fought first set that went to a breaker, Harwood cruised through the second to capture a 7-6 (1), 6-0 win at the top line. The CNU freshman improved to 3-3 against regionally-ranked opponents, including two wins against Savage.
Rounding out the match, Konell captured a straight set win over Lutz at No. 5, 6-3, 6-2, and
Isabelle Wessel stepped in for the win at No. 6, dropping Walker 6-4, 2-6, 10-4.
