May 19, 2002
PALO ALTO, Calif. – Notre Dame senior Lindsey Green (El Cajon, Calif.) and junior Katie Cunha (Mercer Island, Wash.) will open play in the 2002 NCAA Doubles Championship on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. (PDT), taking on the nation’s second-ranked team in the opening round. The 32-team tournament of the best doubles squads in college tennis will continue with one round per day through Saturday at the Taube Tennis Center. Live scoring of all matches throughout the tournament will be available at www.gostanford.com/sports/w-tennis/ncaa2002.
Cunha and Green, ranked 55th nationally, have posted a 6-3 record together this season, while another match was abandoned with them leading 7-4. Overall this season, Green holds a 24-16 record in doubles, while Cunha is 18-21.
The two had never teamed up until the last weekend of March, when they were penciled into the Notre Dame lineup at the No. 1 spot. Their debut was an 8-1 loss to the nation’s then-top-ranked team of Bea Bielik and Janet Bergman from Wake Forest, the same team Cunha and Green will meet in the first round of the NCAA Championship. Of the two other losses for the Irish team, one was in a tiebreaker and one was to an NCAA Doubles qualifying team from Texas.
Green will finish her career as one of the most successful doubles players in the program’s history. She holds a 105-40 (.724) mark in partnered play, which places her in a tie for second place (with classmate Becky Varnum ) in career doubles triumphs, just four shy of the school record, held by 2001 graduate Michelle Dasso.
The Irish pair will face the tournament’s second-seeded team, who advanced to the quarterfinals of the NCAA Doubles Championship each of the past two years and earned All-America honors in the process. In 2001, Bielik and Bergman lost to eventual national champions Whitney Laiho and Jessica Lehnoff in the round of eight.
Bielik and Bergman are 31-3 this season, though they lost in their last match together ? a 9-7 loss to Duke’s Hillary Adams and Kelly McCain in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament semifinals. That loss was the only one for Bergman/Bielik in dual-match play, as they posted an 18-1 mark together this spring. The two fall losses for the pair both came to the current national No. 1 team, Lauren Kalvaria and Gabriela Lastra of Stanford — one via retirement due to injury in the quarterfinals of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association All-American Championships and an 8-4 loss in the final of the Omni Hotels National Intercollegiate Indoor Championship. Twenty-one times this season, Bergman and Bielik have surrendered three or fewer games in obtaining victory. The pair split up for the NCAA Team Championship, with Bielik posting a 3-0 record with Karin Coetzee and Bergman winning two of three matches with Maren Haus.
A win for Cunha and Green would send them into Wednesday’s second round against either the Adams/McCain of Duke or Illinois State’s team of Alesia Mikalayeva and Liina Suurvarik at 2:00 p.m.
The berth for Cunha and Green, the first in both of their careers, marks the 10th consecutive year that a Notre Dame doubles pair has earned a bid in the NCAA championships. Three Irish doubles teams have reached the national quarterfinals with Michelle Dasso and Jennifer Hall doing it most recently, in 1999.