Doubles Team Delivers Historic NCAA Title for Georgia Women's Tennis

Forty years ago, in 1984, Lisa Spain Short delivered the Georgia women’s tennis program its first NCAA singles title. Ten years later, when the Bulldogs hosted the NCAAs for the first time, they won the program’s first team title and Angela Lettiere Simon captured the singles title.

There must be something about years that end with a 4 for Georgia.

With a big forehand winner to the right side by Dasha Vidmanova on match point, the Georgia doubles team of Vidmanova and Aysegul Mert captured the 2024 NCAA women’s doubles championship in dramatic fashion Saturday in Stillwater, Okla. The duo also made history, becoming the Bulldogs’ first NCAA doubles champions, two go along with two NCAA team titles and three singles titles (Chelsey Gullickson won in 2010.).

Vidmanova and Mert, facing the No. 1 seeds in Pepperdine’s Janice Tjen and Savannah Broadus, had to go the distance to get the win. After Georgia won the opening set in a tiebreaker, the Waves pair jumped out to an early lead and easily took the second set, forcing a deciding 10-point tiebreaker instead of a third set.

In the tiebreaker, Georgia led 5-2 before Pepperdine rallied. Trailing 9-8, Vidmanova won both points on her serve to give the Bulldogs their first match point. Tjen served to Vidmanova in the ad court, and the powerful 6-foot-3 junior hit a big backhand return down the middle. Broadus’ volley didn’t have much on it, allowing Vidmanova to run up and smack the forehand winner crosscourt to capture the championship, 7-6 (7-4), 2-6, 11-9.

This wasn’t the first time the four players had been on the court together this month. They faced off last week in the semifinals of the team tournament when Georgia beat the Waves to reach the final. In their match at No. 1 doubles, Mert and Vidmanova led 6-5 when play was stopped because Georgia had clinched the doubles point.

“We knew it was going to be a tough match and I think we started off pretty strong,” Vidmanova said in the post-match news conference. “Then it got kind of closer and in the second set they broke us early so we were down. Then it was match tiebreak and obviously anything can happen. We just tried to play our game and do what we know how to do, and we did it.”

Mert and Vidmanova credited first-year associate head coach Jarryd Chaplin with making them better doubles players this year.

“He was a big addition and he literally taught us how to play doubles,” Vidmanova said.

Added Mert, a freshman: “I don’t think it would be possible if I didn’t have (Vidmanova). I’m just grateful for her and Chaps. I don’t think anyone knows how much time he spends with us teaching doubles.”

The duo’s win Saturday at the Greenwood Tennis Center capped a stellar Georgia season, run through SEC play and the NCAAs. The Bulldogs shared the SEC regular-season title with Texas A&M, beat A&M in the SEC tournament finals, and then lost to the Aggies in the finals of the NCAA tournament. Georgia, which beat the Aggies three times during the season but came up a little short in the fourth meeting, finished ranked No. 3 in the country.

The Bulldogs kept winning once the NCAA singles and doubles tournaments began. Vidmanova and Anastasiia Lopata made the quarterfinals of the singles — Georgia was the only school with two in the final eight — and Lopata played for a national championship on Saturday. Facing the No. 8 seed, Alexa Noel of Miami, the No. 70-ranked Lopata, a sophomore who got into the tournament field as the ninth alternate, took the first set, lost the second, and then Noel prevailed in the third, winning 4-6, 7-5, 6-3.

Lopata, who primarily played at the No. 4 spot in Georgia’s singles lineup, took down the No. 2 seed, Amelia Rajecki of N.C. State, in straight sets in Friday’s semifinal. She ended her season with 12 wins in her final 14 matches, and was a game away, leading 5-4 on serve in the second set, from winning a national championship.

Georgia last had an NCAA singles finalist in 2019, when Katerina Jokic, the ITA Player Of the Year, played for the title, coming up a little short, also to a Miami player, Estela Perez-Somarriba. The last time Georgia had a duo play for the doubles title was in 2014, when Lauren Herring Cole and Maho Kowase Eckervall lost in the final. The Bulldogs, who won NCAA titles in 1994 and 2000, were the runner-up in 1987, 2019 and this season.

The NCAA singles and doubles tournaments are often unpredictable, especially when it comes to participants who played in the finals of the team event. Rather than let the loss to A&M last Sunday affect the Bulldogs when individual play began, Georgia played like it had something to prove.

“Especially after losing in the team finals, I told myself that when I’m back on that final stage again, I will do anything to not be in that losing situation again,” Mert said. “When we we’re down today, I kept on thinking about that moment and did everything I could to be on the winning side.”

And the Bulldogs, who played for a team title, played for the singles title and won the doubles, proved plenty this postseason and all season long. In Drake Bernstein’s first season as head coach after many years as Jeff Wallace’s right-hand man, Georgia is right where it has been for decades: one of the best programs in the country.

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