After fighting past five tough opponents to reach the NCAA singles championship, sophomore Carol Zhao couldn’t complete her run to the title, as she fell in a three-set final to Jamie Loeb of North Carolina to earn runner-up honors in the tournament.
The 6-2, 4-6, 6-1 loss to Loeb, the No. 7 player in the country, snapped a 15-match winning streak for Zhao. The sophomore actually trailed 4-3 in the second set and was in danger of losing in straight sets before rebounding to force a third set, which Loeb won easily.
Zhao would have been the Cardinal’s 17th singles collegiate champion overall and Stanford’s first since Nicole Gibbs won in 2013.
Leading up to the final, Zhao, the No. 2 singles player in the nation, had not dropped a set in the singles tournament until the national semifinals, when she lost the first set to No. 13 Josie Kuhlman of Florida and fell behind 4-3 in the second set before rattling off wins in the next nine consecutive games to proceed to the finals.
Before then, she had collected straight-set victories over four other opponents, including conference foes Zsofi Susanyi of Cal and Chanelle Van Nguyen of UCLA. Last year, Zhao made it into the round of 16 before losing to Susanyi, making this trip to the top doubly sweet.
Neither Caroline Doyle nor Taylor Davidson, the other two singles selections for Stanford, progressed past the second round, as Davidson fell to Virginia’s Danielle Collins, the defending national champion, in the first round, while Doyle lost to Robin Anderson, the top-ranked player in the nation, in the second round.
Meanwhile, in the doubles bracket, it was the duo of Doyle and senior Ellen Tsay that made an impressive run, as the two made it into the national semifinals before losing to Maya Jansen and Erin Routliffe of Alabama, who successfully defended their national title from a season ago by again winning it all this year.
Davidson and Zhao also made a run of their own into the quarterfinals as the tournament’s No. 2 overall seed before falling to Brooke Austin and Kourtney Keegan of Florida.
Stanford is in prime position to make another deep run into all three national brackets next season — team, singles and doubles — as the team only loses Tsay and returns the talented trio of Zhao, Davidson and Doyle to serve as an experienced centerpiece to build a team around.
Contact Do-Hyoung Park at dhpark ‘at’ stanford.edu.