While her teammates suffered through a rain-drenched weekend at the Brown Invitational, women's tennis player Bianca Aboubakare '11 spent the weekend at Pepperdine University in sunny Malibu, Calif.
Aboubakare, who was named the Rookie of the Year last year in the ITA East Region and in the Ivy League, competed in a pre-qualifying weekend battle for a spot to play in the Riviera/ITA Women's All-American Championships. She was one of 64 players invited to the pre-qualifying tournament with hopes of advancing to the qualifying draw, whose top eight players then compete in the main draw against the top 24 players in the country.
Aboubakare needed to win three matches to advance to the qualifying tournament, and she started off sharp. In the first round, she drew Louisiana State senior Mykala Hedberg, the No. 2 singles player on a team that finished 27th in the country last year.
Down 5-3 in the first set, Aboubakare won four games in a row to win 7-5. That set the tone for what would be a back-and-forth match.
In the second set, the Brown sophomore was up 5-4, but she lost seven match points, as Hedberg went on to win that set 7-5. In the third, Aboubakare came out firing, putting away her opponent for good with a 6-2 victory.
Still, the match took a lot out of Aboubakare, who lost 10 match points to Hedberg before getting the victory. Hedberg "plays a lot better when she's down," Aboubakare said. "She was hitting some really great shots on those points."
Only an hour later, Aboubakare faced Baylor sophomore Jelena Stanivuk, ranked No. 97 in the country. Out of energy and playing against an opponent who had won her first match in two sets, Aboubakare fell 6-1, 6-3, eliminating her from the tournament.
Aboubakare had an opportunity to make the match close in the second set, down 5-3, and leading the game 40-15. Instead, Stanivuk used her physical strength to out-hit Aboubakare and capture that game for the match victory.
Brown Head Coach Paul Wardlaw said the Baylor player was described by one of her coaches as being like Nuke LaLoosh, the erratic pitcher played by Tim Robbins in "Bull Durham."
"When she's on, she'd be a good player for the men's team," Wardlaw said. Aboubakare said her opponent's playing style was unusual.
"Her ball was a lot heavier. There was more spin with more pace," she said. "Most girls hit either pace and no spin or they're only soft, spinny girls, but she was pretty strong."
Wardlaw said this was the first time in his five years at Brown that a player had been invited to the tournament. One of his goals for his players this year, he said, is to face strong out-of-conference opponents both as a team and individually, as Aboubakare did this weekend.
"What we need to do as a program is we need to have our players and our team raise the level of our opponents," Wardlaw said. "East Coast tennis is probably the weakest region, so we gotta get out of the region and play some teams."
