If Duke had forgotten how tough ACC play is after its scorching start to the season, the team certainly remembers now.
The Blue Devils suffered their first loss of the season to No. 3 Virginia last Friday, but they retained the top ranking nationally after bouncing back to beat Syracuse. No. 1 Duke gets no reprieve as it must face two more ranked ACC challengers this week, hosting No. 25 Notre Dame Friday at 6 p.m. and No. 11 North Carolina Sunday at noon.
“We’ll be excited to play Friday starting with that Notre Dame match and then it doesn’t get any easier Sunday,” head coach Jamie Ashworth said. “We’re almost looking at it like Coach K looks at [the NCAA tournament].”
Duke (8-1, 1-1 in the ACC) has already played the Tar Heels once this season, defeating them 4-2 in the quarterfinals of the ITA National Indoor Tournament in early February. Since losing to Duke, North Carolina (10-2, 2-0) has rattled off five straight wins.
Another Duke win against its Tobacco Road rival won’t come easily. Ashworth stressed that the Blue Devils could not fall behind early in their match Sunday like they did in the loss to Virginia.
“It’s going to come down to a couple points here or there,” he said. “Having won the whole match last time, we don’t want to give them any kind of confidence to feed off of early in the match. The starts are really important for us.”
Sunday's match will feature a rematch between the nation's top two singles players, No. 1 Jamie Loeb of North Carolina and No. 2 Beatrice Capra of Duke. When the two squared off in Charlottesville, Va., two weekends ago, it was Capra who came away with a straight-set victory.
North Carolina is perhaps one of the few teams on Duke’s slate with more depth than the Blue Devils. The Tar Heels have five ranked singles players—including No. 6 Hayley Carter—to the Blue Devils’ four. Ashworth said defeating North Carolina for a second time will take nothing short of a total team effort.
“For us to do as well as we want to do, we have to have eight people contributing,” Ashworth said. “We’re going to keep experimenting with different lineups, which gives us a bit of an advantage because other teams can’t match up with us…. I don’t anticipate having a set lineup all year.”
The Blue Devils will be playing these matches in the friendly confines of Durham, where they are a perfect 5-0 this season. Duke’s match Sunday against Syracuse was its first outdoor match of the year, and assuming no more snow befalls the Southeast, the team will once again be outdoors in Ambler Tennis Stadium against North Carolina.
Although neither team will have an obvious advantage because Chapel Hill has received just as much snow as Durham, making outside practice for the Tar Heels just as limited, the change in atmosphere could impact the match.
“[Playing outside] changes your mindset a little bit because the points are longer and the courts are slower,” Ashworth said. “There are definitely more distractions. It changes your level of conditioning a bit because you have to grind some points out.”
By contrast, the match Friday against Notre Dame (5-4, 0-2) will be played in Sheffield Indoor Tennis Center. Ambler Tennis Stadium's lights are not up to NCAA code, so due to the match's 6 p.m. start the match will be played indoors even without the presence of inclement weather.
The Fighting Irish lack the firepower and big names of North Carolina—with no singles players and just one doubles pair ranked in the ITA top 125. Ashworth emphasized that his team can’t look past Notre Dame in anticipation of the much-touted rematch with its Tobacco Road rivals.
“Notre Dame’s good—especially indoors, they’re a really good team,” Ashworth said. “We compared them to the Michigan team we played in the first round of indoors. They’re going to come out and hit the ball hard, and the points will be a little bit flatter and shorter than [the points] we want to play. We’re going to have to control the tempo in-between the points and within the points really well.”
It’s a big weekend for the squad, with a lot of ever-shifting variables in terms of conditions, lineups and the threats presented by its opponents.
In other words, it’s just another weekend in the ACC.
“It’s probably our toughest home weekend all year, and we’ve always had great matches with both [teams],” Ashworth said. “But we’re 1-1 [in the ACC] and we have 12 conference matches left, and we’re trying to put ourselves in the best position for April.”
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