ORLANDO, Fla. – To win the program’s first-ever national championship, head coach Brian Kalbas said he had to learn how to make changes and take risks.
A perfect, undefeated regular season, an ITA Indoor National Championship title and a No. 1 ranking, Kalbas said, put a target on the North Carolina women’s tennis team’s back heading into the postseason.
At the ACC Tournament, the N.C. State Wolfpack handed the Tar Heels their first loss of the season and a blow to their confidence. Without change, another successful regular season would go down in the record books as another postseason drop-off.
For four straight years, UNC has entered the NCAA Tournament as one of the top-two seeds, but for the past three years, the team struggled to match their dominant regular seasons with a championship trophy. 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, where they fell 3-4 to the UCLA Bruins.
Kalbas said the last three years of having that target on their backs and entering the tournament with nearly-perfect records, meant there were few opportunities where the Tar Heels learned from losses and figured out how to improve their game.
But, the ACC Championship loss in April provided that rare opportunity for the team to re-group and fix the gaps in their game plan.
“They made us better,” Kalbas said. “We had to kind of look inward and figure out some things because, you know, we hadn't lost. For us to kind of have a little more of a growth mentality and look at some different things, the openness of this team to do that was special.”
So, before the first round kicked off in Chapel Hill, Kalbas made a drastic change to the line-ups. The doubles pairs that had been playing together all season and had only lost the team point three times were all reconfigured. Instead of playing at the No. 3 seed, graduate student Abbey Forbes moved up to the No. 1 spot with junior Fiona Crawley.
First-year Reese Brantmeier traded the No. 1 seed for the No. 3 seed to play alongside junior Reilly Tran, and senior Elizabeth Scotty moved down a court to play with sophomore Carson Tanguilig.