By Fiona Noonan on January 28, 2014

The No. 1 ranked Stanford women’s tennis team opened its regular season dual-match slate with decisive back-to-back shutout victories this past week, beating UC-Davis 7-0 on Friday and No. 69 Princeton 7-0 on Tuesday at the Taube Family Tennis Center.

The Cardinal (2-0) collected its 900th victory in program history against the Aggies (1-1). The Cardinal started strong when it took the doubles point to start the day 1-0 on Friday. In the No. 1 spot, the No. 15 duo of senior Kristie Ahn and freshman Carol Zhao cruised past UC-Davis’s Nicole Koehly and Layla Sanders 6-0. The No. 16 team of freshman Taylor Davidson and junior Ellen Tsay, in addition to the tandem of freshman Caroline Doyle and sophomore Krista Hardebeck, each took home wins of their own.

In the course of three doubles matches, Stanford lost only three games total, which set the tone for the following six singles matches.

On the singles side, the Cardinal — with five nationally ranked players, including the sixth-ranked Ahn — maintained its dominance against the unranked Aggies, dropping just eight games in total and winning each match in straight sets.

In her dual-match debut, Davidson started the team off with a 6-0, 6-0 win against Davis’s Kamia Kecki, and she was quickly joined in victory by Hardebeck, Tsay, Doyle and Zhao before Ahn concluded the match with a 6-3, 6-0 at No. 1 singles.

Friday’s matches also represented the regular-season debuts for Doyle and Zhao.

On Tuesday, the Cardinal continued its dominance and cruised through its matches against No. 69 Princeton (1-1) at home, winning 7-0 once again.

Princeton was coming off of a 6-1 win against Temple in its own dual-match opener last week, but the momentum was not enough to hold off the surging Cardinal. Princeton’s head coach Laura Granville <\#213>03 hails from the Farm. Granville won the NCAA individual singles title as a freshman and sophomore. She turned pro after her sophomore season and remained a member of the Women’s Tennis Association until 2010 before returning to Stanford to finish her degree in 2012.

Stanford again started by winning its three doubles matches over the Tigers and taking the doubles point before steamrolling on the singles side. Stanford clinched the dual match with No. 94 Tsay’s 6-0, 6-3 win against Princeton’s only ranked singles player, No. 62 Alanna Wolff.

The Cardinal dropped only one set, during Zhao’s No. 4 singles match against Emily Hahn. Zhao eventually came back to win 6-2, 3-6, 1-0 (10-6) for the team’s fifth singles victory of the afternoon.

Stanford goes on the road for a Texas doubleheader against University of Texas on Friday and Rice on Saturday. Matches played over the next month will be played under the experimental rules format, which was designed to decrease the length of matches.

Contact Fiona Noonan at fnoonan ‘at’ stanford.edu.