Oct. 4, 2006
Pacific Palisades, Calif. – University of Notre Dame junior Brook Buck lost her consolation match in the qualifying singles portion of the 2006 Riviera/ITA Women’s All-American Championships to Elizabeth Ferris of Utah, 6-2, 6-4. Buck, ranked No. 66, lost her second straight match to drop to 2-3 this fall.
Buck, who lost a hard-fought, three-set match to No. 29 Danielle Sternberg of Arizona Tuesday, will now focus her attention on the main draw of doubles. Buck and sophomore Kelcy Tefft, ranked No. 27 in the preseason ITA doubles poll, will start play on Thursday.
Senior twins’ Christian and Catrina Thompson will also open defense of their title from a year ago. Preseason No. 3, the Thompson twins gave the University of Notre Dame its first-ever title in an Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) national championship last year.
The Thompsons were the first team from any school to reach the title match of the ITA All-American Championships in consecutive years and come away with a title. Each of the three previous back-to-back finalists had gone winless in both attempts.
Notre Dame knocked off three top-seven teams to reach last year’s final and lost just 16 total games in the tournament, the second-fewest ever by a doubles champion. The team of Sarah Riske and Aleke Tsoubanos of Vanderbilt in 2002 surrendered 11. The Irish opened with an 8-0 victory over No. 7 Gabrielle Duch and Neyssa Etienne of South Florida. The twins beat No. 6 Alice Barnes and Anne Yelsey of Stanford, 9-7, and came back with an 8-1 triumph against #3 Iva Gersic and Maja Kovacek of New Mexico in the semifinals.
Catrina and Christian are the second set of twins from any school — and the first in the All-Americans — ever to win an ITA national championship, following Tami and Teri Whitlinger of Stanford, who won the 1989 ITA National Intercollegiate Indoor Championships.
This is the first of three national championship events during the 2006-07 collegiate tennis season. Two others are the ITA National Intercollegiate Indoor Championships in November and the season-ending NCAA Championships in May in Athens, Ga.
— ND —