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You haven't truly experienced Duke unless you walk around at 7 AM on a Saturday; it gives new meaning to the word 'deserted.' But our 10 o'clock match required an early warm-up, and our dear coach, Jamie Ashworth, wanted us to be "alert and ready to go," which in my case, means waking up a minimum of 3 hours before the start of a match. Sometimes, even that doesn't really work. As motivation (or BRIBERY) for waking up at this atrocious hour, we were treated to a breakfast buffet at the Washington Duke...I don't speak for the whole team here, but the combination of "breakfast" and "buffet" never bodes well to my dietary habits. After eating an assortment of approximately 2 danishes, a croissant, an omelet, a muffin, and an infinite number of french toasts, we were ready to get started.

Unfortunately, there was a slight flaw to our morning: Amanda, our favorite bubbly teammate, was conspicuously absent from our group. She had woken up this morning with some kind of a ridiculous stomach virus, and had to go to the training room to get an IV...it was pretty apparent that she would be in no shape to play today. This presented us with a pretty hefty quandary: with the absence of Amanda, we only had 5 healthy players to take the court. Hmmmmmmm. Solution? TARA IYER SAVES THE DAY!!!

That's right, Tara was the hero of the day, as she teamed up with Amanda's usual partner Melissa (a.k.a Isamel, but noone really calls her that) to win their doubles match 8-3, after literally not having hit a ball for AT LEAST a few months. It wasn't particularly spectacular, due to the obvious inhibition of movement on Tara's part, but they totally got the job done, and it gave our whole team a boost. Adding Melissa and Tara's win to the pure destruction that Ellah and I produced on court 3, we ended up winning the doubles point to start off the match. On court 2, Mal (OUR LITTLE BABY FRESHMAN!!!) and Jess were also dominating, and were up 6-3 before the doubles point was won. Oh, and this would probably be a good time to mention WHO exactly we were playing: the VCU Rams.

Next came singles....since I was technically playing tennis and not paying attention at the beginning, I didn't manage to keep track of everyone's score, except for Jess', since I am perpetually hypnotized by the barrage of volleys and overheads that always seem to be occurring on her court. She got down an early break, but then battled back to win the first set 6-4. Meanwhile, our amazing adorable freshman MALLORY had done a little something I would term BEASTLINESS and won her match 6-1, 6-0. I was the second one off the court (by literally 2 milliseconds) and won 6-0, 6-0, to the utter dismay of my opponent, who seemed particularly flustered by the incredible shanks I managed to produce on the run. With those two wins, we went up 3-0, and only needed one more win to clinch! At this point, it seemed that Ellah, Melissa, and Jess were determined to keep us in suspense and vie for that all-important clinching honor. Ellah happened to be the one to do it, keeping the foot stomps to a minimum, and won her match 6-0, 6-4. That second set was a little tighter, maybe due to the fact that her opponent's grunts got continually more annoying as the match progressed. With the match won, Melissa and Jess were the last two on court. Melissa had a temporary out-of-body experience when she was up 5-2, (you know what I'm talking about, we've ALL done it) but returned to her body just in time, to win the second set 7-6. Jess, or Robocop as Jay called her today, continued her onslaught of netness, hitting 20 million volleys and overheads in the last 6 games, and took the second set 6-1.

sooooo, to sum the day up:

Duke: 6 VCU: 1

Great success!

till next time............

-REKA