National title eludes BYUH tennis team

Brigham Young-Hawaii’s national championship drought in women’s tennis is now five years, barely.

Armstrong Atlantic, a small public university in Savannah, Ga., won its fourth NCAA Division II championship in five years by defeating the Seasiders in Saturday’s championship.

The third-ranked Pirates stopped top-ranked BYUH 5-2 in Louisville, Ky. The Seasiders ended their season 29-1, and hugely disappointed.

“We did not play our best,” said BYUH coach Dave Porter by phone. “Today they were the best team. If we play 10 times, we win most of them. We just needed one more point somewhere. We’ll regroup and try to take care of the losses we will suffer — the ones not here next year — and get some new ones and try again next year.”

Armstrong (29-0) defeated fifth-ranked Hawaii Pacific in the quarterfinals Thursday and defending national champion Barry in the semifinals. The Pirates have now won seven NCAA D-II championships, which ties BYU-Hawaii’s D-II record. BYUH also won two NAIA titles.

The Seasiders’ only losses the past five years have come at nationals, where they came up just short — as they did Saturday, with four freshmen.

BYU-Hawaii’s Annie Hwang and Sherry Liu, the national freshman of the year, opened the match with an easy win at first doubles, 8-1. The two other BYUH doubles teams lost 8-5, with the loss at No. 2 doubles particularly painful.

“We played well this week, beat some good teams pretty badly,” Porter said. “We were confident going in today. We had game point at 5-3 to go up 6-3 serving at No. 2. I thought we were there, and all of a sudden things changed.”

With a 2-1 advantage, Armstrong won five of six first sets in the singles matches. Victories at the fifth and sixth singles courts made it 4-1.

Hwang, ranked No. 1 nationally, beat sixth-ranked Barbora Krtickova 6-3, 6-1 at No. 1 to close the gap. Meanwhile Liu and Yuan Jia, the Seasiders’ lone senior, won second sets to even matches on the Nos. 2 and 3 courts.

Then Kathleen Henry, Armstrong’s only senior, battled back from a 5-3 second-set deficit to force a tiebreaker against Tanja Rebholz. Henry won it 7-2 to clinch the title.

Liu and Yuan were up in the third set when play was halted.

Armstrong Atlantic coach Simon Earnshaw recalled years when his program could never reach BYU-Hawaii’s level.

“When Andy Roddick was No. 2 in the world, they asked him if he had a rivalry with Roger Federer,” Earnshaw said. “He said it’s no rivalry until you beat them.

“Early in the rivalry there was no rivalry. They were just killing us. In fact, my first five years we got eliminated by them four of those five times.

“We’ve been fortunate to play extremely well situationally in some big matches.”