Two Sundays ago, with a week remaining in the regular season, Mallory Cecil was preparing for a wild end to a jam-packed year as Duke's No. 1 singles player. She was slated to face three ranked opponents in the next week, and professional tournaments were the last thing on her mind.
It only took a phone call to change that.
On Sunday, April 5, Doug Cecil phoned his daughter, a freshman in her first semester at Duke. She had been offered a last-minute wild card into the main draw of the Family Circle Cup, a prestigious professional tournament in Charleston, S.C., he said. After he broke the news, there was a slight pause.
"Awesome!" Mallory Cecil replied.
The reaction drew a laugh from Doug Cecil.
"Coming from Mallory, 'awesome' is a good thing," he said.
The 18-year-old has come a long way since she last participated in the Family Circle Cup seven years ago. At the age of 11, Mallory Cecil was in the Tier I tournament-as a ball girl.
It was a big deal back then, too. For a month before the tournament, Cecil and her mother Julie made the three-hour drive to Charleston every weekend so that Cecil could train to be a ball girl.
And in that week of the Family Circle Cup in 2002, Cecil's eyes were opened to things she had probably never imagined about the Women's Tennis Association tour. She heard the players' on-court language and noted their demeanor. She didn't know what they would be like face-to-face, but that week, when she was five feet away from them, Cecil got to see firsthand what it takes to be a professional tennis player, Doug Cecil said.
Her experience at the tournament had a larger effect on the aspiring young player than her father ever imagined. Now, Mallory Cecil recalls Patty Snyder, currently the No. 17 player in the world, advancing in the tournament, and remembers that her 11-year-old self had a dream of one day playing in the Family Circle Cup.
"I knew that if I kept practicing, kept playing and kept gaining experience, that I could potentially have the opportunity," Cecil said. "Maybe it wasn't as heavily in my mind at that point, but as I got older it was like, 'That's definitely something that I want to be able to play in.'"
Making a dream a reality
Seven years later, Cecil has come full circle. Snyder is back among the contestants in the Family Circle Cup main draw, but this time, so is Cecil. The freshman played consecutive matches Friday and Saturday at Duke before the tournament against the No. 1 and No. 7 players on the college level, but even that couldn't keep Cecil away from realizing an 11-year-old's dream.
Shifting from college tennis to the WTA circuit was far from a breeze, though. Almost as soon as Duke pushed past Georgia Tech Saturday afternoon, Cecil was on her way to Charleston with her father and Duke head coach Jamie Ashworth.
And despite how much tennis Mallory Cecil plays for the Blue Devils, the Family Circle Cup presented a unique challenge. Unlike some of the smaller-scale professional tournaments she had played in the past, the Family Circle offers more than $1 million in prize money and this year drew big names like Venus Williams and Elena Dementieva as top seeds.
And to top it all off, the tournament is played on clay, a surface Cecil hadn't played on in over a year.
Although clay is Cecil's favorite surface, it requires at least a three-day transition period for players accustomed to hard courts, her father said.
Cecil arrived in Charleston Saturday night and practiced on the clay Sunday. On Monday morning at 10 a.m., she headed out to Stadium Court to face the No. 41 player in the world, Virginie Razzano.
Cecil didn't start out well against Razzano, the No. 13 seed. Whether it was not being used to the surface, the unfamiliar shoes or possibly the effects of playing her third match in four days, Cecil quickly dropped the first set to the French player.
Despite losing the second set as well, she doesn't think the 6-1, 6-2 score was telling. The young wild card had a lot of opportunities to win more games than she did.
"It is a totally different level out here [on the pro circuit]," Doug Cecil said. "[Mallory] had to make the transition overnight, basically."
And though Mallory Cecil was disappointed that she didn't play her best, she viewed the tournament as a tremendous opportunity to face a seeded player on Stadium Court with a capacity of more than 10,000. Besides, the experience gained from playing a top-50 opponent would be difficult to overstate.
"I feel like every match, even if I lose, I need to pull something from that, something that I need to work on," Cecil said. "[Monday] really showed me a couple things I need to work on.... I think playing these kinds of tournaments, versus college, you pull out more individual stuff."
Adjusting to college
The Family Circle Cup represented Cecil's first professional tennis action since the end of 2008. For her, 2009 presented a new challenge-college tennis.
And since appearing on the college scene in January, the talented freshman has staged a spectacular rise in the rankings. Cecil jumped 15 spots in the latest poll to settle in at No. 16, a team high. She was also named ACC Women's Tennis Player of the Week for the second time this season after outstanding wins over three ranked players last week.
One of the things that has impressed Ashworth and Doug Cecil most has been Cecil's approach to the game.
"That's the neat thing about Mallory," Doug Cecil said. "Her composure is virtually always the same. She is very upbeat before matches, but as soon as it's match time, she is focused, and she's got phenomenal focus. That's her character, and that's given her the ability to get to where she's gotten in a very short period of time."
Mallory Cecil's mental toughness was on full display Feb. 28 against Northwestern's Maria Mosolova, then the No. 1 player in the country. Cecil had lost a three-set match to Mosolova only two weeks earlier, but in Evanston, Cecil fought to the very end and came out victorious after two tiebreakers.
"[Cecil's] mentally tough, but she's also smart," Ashworth said. "Even when she makes mistakes, she sees the game really well. She knows where the ball needs to be. She knows the mistakes that she's making. She's still doing the right things, she doesn't stop doing them, even though she may have missed a couple balls wide or a couple balls long."
Part of Cecil's late-season success could be attributed to a midseason clash with one of the hottest players on the college level, Miami's Julia Cohen. Cecil dropped that March 22 meeting to Cohen, 6-3, 6-3, and as a team, Duke lost the dual match 5-2.
"The Miami match was kind of like a slap in the face," Cecil said. "Miami, they have really obnoxious fans, you're not playing at home, everybody's cheering against you. I think I let everything get to me instead of just focusing on the match and what I needed to do."
After absorbing the defeat, Cecil had a simple message for her coach.
Her goal was to not lose another match in the regular season. Almost a month later, Cecil can tick that goal off her list, defeating two of the nation's best as part of a nine-match winning streak.
Add it to Cecil's history of defying odds. When Doug Cecil was asked whether he thought it would have been possible, back in 2002, that his daughter could one day be playing in the Family Circle Cup, he had to stifle a chuckle.
"No, I did not," he said. "That was not even in the cards at that time.... I think I remember her saying that she hoped one day she'd get to be here [in the Family Circle Cup], but you know, that's the dream of an 11-year-old."
A dream that an 18-year-old, the top singles player on the No. 3 team in the country, made a reality.
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