Owls Outlast Pioneers

Friday, March 1

Houston, Texas

1:00 pm

Rice University

#45 Denver

3/1/2019 5:35:00 PM | Women's Tennis

Box Score

El Jardi delivers clincher in third set

By: Chuck Pool (cpool@rice.edu)

The Lead: Freshman Diae El Jardi held serve in the 11^th game and followed with her fifth service break of the final set to clinch a 4-3 win for Rice over Denver at the George R. Brown Tennis Center on Friday afternoon. With the win, the 47^th ranked Owls improved to 7-4 while the 45^th ranked Pioneers fell to 8-3.

Doubles: Priya Niezgoda and Anastasia Smirnova improved their doubles record to 9-1 with a 6-3 win on at the first line to give Rice the early lead in the match. El Jardi and Linda Huang opened things for the Owls with a 6-1 win at the third line. Rice improved to 9-2 on the season in doubles by capturing the point.

Singles: With Michaela Haet out of the lineup due to an injury, Victoria and Anastasia Smirnova moved up to the first two singles lines and the freshmen twin sisters responded with their first career wins over ranked opponents in dual competition to give the Owls a 3-2 lead. Anastasia quickly expanded the Owls lead to 2-0 with a 6-1, 6-2 win over No. 114 Arisha Ladhani while Victoria ground out a 7-4 win in a first-set tiebreaker and maintained that momentum to post a 7-6, 6-3 win over 91^st ranked Bianca Mok. Denver tied the match with wins at three, four and five leaving the match on El Jardi's racquet. The freshman from Casablanca, Morocco traded 6-4 sets with the Pioneers' Toni Nelson to set the stage for the decisive final set. Both players battled with their serves, trading breaks until Nelson held at 5-5 and El Jardi responded with a hold of her own at 6-5, setting the stage for one final service break to clinch the match.

Elizabeth Schmidt: "Whenever you have a lineup change, no matter who it is, it's an opportunity for people to step up and that's what we did today. With Miki out, some other people stepped up. Credit to the Smirnova's for getting those quick wins. Really proud of Diae. She hasn't played that much this spring and to come out in that situation, under that pressure, to have all eyes on you, she composed herself and really took it to her in those last two games. I think we came out really well in doubles with a lot of energy and really took it to them early. We've been talking a lot about energy and attitude this week and I thought our team did a nice job of that as a group. Not just individually on your court, but also knowing you can affect your teammates in multiple ways—positive and negative—and we're going to work to affect our teammates positively as we can out there. Just overall proud of the team for gutting out the victory. This is a hard-fought, well-earned victory by our team.

Up Next: Rice will close out the current homestand with a dual match against Minnesota at 10 a.m. on Sunday.