Injury Prevents Cao From Going On

Entering this weekend’s ITA Northeast Regional Championships in Hanover, N.H., tennis junior co-captain Holly Cao had no reason to doubt her ability to post another top performance. As the tournament’s third seed and defending champion, she seemed poised to recapture the singles title. But Cao refused to get bogged down in history, approaching this tournament as any other.

“I didn’t really think about [my performance here last year],” Cao said. “I just wanted to play well, enjoy the tournament, and see where that took me.”

The junior, who holds a 7-2 record in the singles slot so far this season, got off to a dominating start. In the round of 64, Cao handily defeated Stony Brook’s Aylin Mehter, 6-0, 6-2.

She followed this win up with a decisive 6-0, 6-1 victory over Rutgers’ Jennifer Holzberg in the round of 32. Cao then closed out the round of 16, topping rival Yale’s Elizabeth Epstein, 6-0, 3-6, 6-4.

But it was the tournament quarterfinals yesterday that served up an unexpected ball.

During the Saturday’s doubles match with co-captain Samantha Rosekrans, Cao rolled her ankle, an injury that would eventually force her to withdraw from the next match-up against Dartmouth’s Molly Scott.

“I think I twisted my ankle, but I thought it would be fine,” Cao said. “So I played the next singles match. But during [the quarterfinal], it started bothering me a bit, and after speaking to my coach, we decided the best thing would be for me to pull out.”

The ITA Championships main singles draw, which saw action from four other Harvard players, was not without its highlights. Sophomore Kristin Norton, ranked ninth in the tournament, advanced to the round of 16. Norton first coasted to a 6-1, 6-4 win over Rhode Island’s Pam Emery. In the round of 32, she bounced back from a 4-6 first set loss to 6-4, 7-5 wins in the second and third sets.

“Kristin played a great [round of 32] match,” Cao said. “She was tired that morning from her previous match, so she got off to a slower than normal start. It was very close, and she just stuck with it to the finish.”

The ITA Championships’ sixth-ranked Anna Edelman of Binghamton University would end Norton’s bid to the next phase of the tournament with a 6-0, 6-4 victory.

Rosekrans reached the round of 32, moving past Boston University’s Leonie Athanasiadis, who retired due to injury. She then fell to Boston College’s sophomore Alex Kelleher, 6-2, 6-0.

In doubles play, Cao and Rosekrans swept Seton Hall’s Rocio Portela and Pui Wing, 8-0, on their way to the round of 16. The Crimson captain duo was ultimately defeated in an Ivy League face-off against a strong Columbia team of Bianca Sanon and Nicole Bartnik, 8-5.

The Harvard pairings of sophomores Norton and Tachibana and freshmen Natalie Blosser and Hannah Morrill each dropped the opening round of the doubles draw to UMass and Penn, respectively.

“There were a lot of nerves from the freshmen, and that’s normal,” Crimson coach Traci Green said. “You have to learn to get over those. There’s a really high learning curve involved, and this was a great experience for them.”

The team has this upcoming weekend to re-group until it rounds out the fall season right here in Cambridge at the Harvard Invitational on Nov. 5.

“Right now, a couple of our players are dinged up,” Green said. “This is a chance for us to rest. We’ve been giving too many points away instead of letting the other teams win them outright, so that’s something we need to improve on before the Invitational.”

With the fall season rapidly drawing to a close, the Crimson now has a keen sense of its competition—and what it’s going to take to stage a strong turnaround in the spring.

“It’s a very exciting time to be playing in the Ivy League,” Green said. “The competition is very tough. All the schools have improved tremendously due to both training and recruiting. It’s really anybody’s game at this point. We just have to keep our goals in mind for the rest of the semester.”

—Staff writer Aparajita Tripathi can be reached at atripathi@college.harvard.edu.