Efficiency was the name of the game.
After an hour and a half on the court, the second-seeded North Carolina women’s tennis team had already plowed its way into the second round of the NCAA Team Championship. The team overpowered Morgan State, the champions of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, 4-0.
“Normally these matches take two and a half or three hours,” head coach Brian Kalbas said, “so to get done in an hour and a half is good for us.”
It had been a weird process to get to the match. In the time since the Tar Heels beat Duke in the ACC Championship, the practice schedule has be unusual. Due to final exams, training sessions were sporadic and Kalbas said the team was working off rust in the opening round. It didn’t seem to show any in the result.
From the start, the Bears were outmatched. In the doubles matches, the duos of Marika Akkerman and Makenna Jones, Jessie Aney and Alexa Graham both handed their opponents 6-1 losses in under half an hour. Akkerman and Jones finished first and Aney and Graham hammered home the final nail for the early point.
It wouldn’t be the only time on the day Akkerman found herself out front leading her teammates, and making it easier on them.
In her singles match, the senior playing on Court Six dropped just one game over the course of play, winning 6-0, 6-1. She finished more than a dozen minutes before the match was officially clinched. And in her waning UNC career, she was more than happy to be a big part of the win.
“I was having a great time," she said. "(I was) just happy to be out there and just enjoying every second I have left on these courts before I head out of here.”
"I don’t have a lot of moments like these left, so I just want to embrace every one of them.”