Changes in the lineup will prove vital on the road to the NCAA Women’s Tennis Championship

ORLANDO, Fla. To win the programs first national championship, head coach Brian Kalbas said he had to learn to make changes and take risks.

A perfect, undefeated regular season, an ITA Indoor National Championship title and a No. 1 ranking, Kalbas said, set the goal for the North Carolina women’s tennis teams heading back to the postseason.

In the ACC tournament, the NC State Wolfpack handed the Tar Heels their first loss of the season and a blow to their confidence. Without the change, another successful regular season would go down in the record books as the second postseason elimination.

UNC has entered the NCAA Tournament four straight years as a top-two seed, but the past three years the team has struggled to come away with a championship trophy in its dominant regular season. The Tar Heels fell short in the NCAA semifinals in 2019, 2021 and 2022. The last time they advanced to the finals was in 2014, when they fell 3-4 to the UCLA Bruins.

Kalbas said the past three years, with that goal on their backs and entering the tournament with near-perfect records, meant there were few occasions when the Tar Heels learned from losses and figured out how to improve their game.

But the ACC championship loss in April provided the team with a rare opportunity to regroup and fix the holes in its game plan.

They made us better, Kalbas said. We had to look inward and figure some things out because we hadn’t lost. For us to have a bit more of a growth mentality and look at different things, the openness of this team to that was special.

So before the first round started in Chapel Hill, Kalbas made a drastic change to the lineups. The pairs that had played together all season and had only lost a team point three times were reconfigured. Instead of playing at No. 3, sophomore Abbey Forbes stepped up to No. 1 with junior Fiona Crawley.

First-year Reese Brantmeier switched from the No. 1 seed to the No. 3 seed to play alongside junior Reilly Tran, and senior Elizabeth Scotty moved up court to play with sophomore Carson Tanguilig.

The changes did not stop there. Crawley, the nation’s No. 1 collegiate women’s tennis player, traded places as the team’s top singles player with No. 8 Brantmeier. Now Crawley competed on another field instead of playing.

Finally, instead of playing both singles and doubles, Forbes vacated her spot as the team’s No. 4 singles player to allow senior Anika Yarlagadda to play at No. 6.

Despite these late, drastic changes, Kalbas said the team was ready to change things for the best.

The changes paid off. In singles, Crawley won every singles match in the tournament and sent his team a much-needed point in each tight match. Brantmeier picked up wins in three of four singles matches in Orlando against ranked opponents, including No. 3 singles player Georgias Lea Ma.

Although the new pairings struggled to find their rhythm in the Super Regionals and quarterfinals, the teams took each loss as a step and a learning opportunity. When North Carolina’s doubles pairings finally got a doubles point in the semifinals against No. 3 Georgia, the path to the championship match was set.

With memories of the ACC Tournament on their minds, hard work and a desire to make changes lifted UNC to grab a doubles spot against NC State in the national championship against doubles teams that Kalbas called the best in the country.

It’s just something we’ve been working on all year, Tanguilig said.

Kalbas also understood that ultimately winning the NCAA National Championship trophy wasn’t just about hitting the extra ball in practice or coming up with the perfect Game Plan, but rather the mentality that plays into each other.

Together.

Senior team captain Sophia Patel was instrumental in the team’s mentality and the team’s MVP, Kalbas said.

He was our MVP this year, he said in the postgame press conference. He didn’t play in our lineup, but we wouldn’t be anywhere without his leadership, his guidance and his support.

After every match achieved in the tournament, Patel was one of the first players to run onto the field to congratulate his teammates. And every time the tarmac hit their match-winning shot, their team captain was the first person they looked for on the sidelines.

When the trophy was won, Patel was the person who accepted it on behalf of his teammates.

A trophy that could not have been achieved without a selfless team culture, Kalbas calls his brand team tennis.

@carolinewills03

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