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TENNIS

A Pair of Titles

AS THEY PREPARED for the Pac-10 and NCAA championships, the members of the women’s tennis team practiced, they visualized and they focused. And they didn’t forget the intangible X factor.

“Something that’s important to remember is that it’s fun to win,” said Gabriela Lastra near the end of the season. “It’s fun to go out there and really crush your opponents.”

“And Gabby’s been doing a lot of crushing this year,” added doubles partner Lauren Kalvaria.

Lastra wasn’t the only one. The Cardinal, ranked No. 2 for most of the season, suffered only one loss on the way to its 15th consecutive Pac-10 title. Lastra, ranked sixth in the nation, won the 2002 Pac-10 singles championship and was named the conference’s player of the year, and she and Kalvaria earned the 2002 Pac-10 doubles team of the year award. Then, in late May, the team captured its second straight NCAA championship, beating No. 1 Florida. “This has just been an incredible season, from start to finish,” head coach Lele Forood said.

The No. 6 men’s team (20-6), however, was upset by No. 35 Washington in the second round of the NCAAs. Although Stanford had been a preseason favorite after winning the National Team Indoor Championship in February, the team was plagued with illnesses and injuries, including a season-ending April back injury to All-American K.J. Hippensteel, ’02, who was ranked second in the country in singles play.

After winning the women’s team championship, Kalvaria and Lastra, ranked No. 1 in doubles nationally and seeded first in the NCAA tournament, capped their successful senior year by taking the doubles title in straight sets. They became the first women’s doubles champions from Stanford since 1990, when Meredith McGrath, ’99, and Teri Whitlinger, ’91, won the NCAAs.

“Lauren and I have been wanting this for four years now,” Lastra says. “The feelings and emotions of winning the doubles title are really unbelievable and I couldn’t have asked for any other person to share the title with.”

The dynamic duo met more than six years ago, when they were competing as high school students in the Easter Bowl, a junior national tournament in Florida. “We both discovered that we didn’t have partners, and I remember that Lauren came up to me and called me Gabriela,” Lastra says. “Everyone who knows me knows to call me Gabby.”

Kalvaria quickly learned to do so, and she and Lastra traveled together on the junior circuit to Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Italy and Paraguay. Then, when it was time to go to college, Lastra and Keiko Tokuda persuaded Kalvaria to choose Stanford over Florida. The Class of 2002—Kalvaria, Lastra, Tokuda and Marissa Irvin, who turned pro two years ago—helped propel the Cardinal to the NCAA team title as freshmen, lost it their sophomore year and roared back to win it again last year.

Kalvaria and Lastra opted not to play doubles together in 2000-01, but teamed up again this fall, hoping to win the doubles title and then join the professional tour (which they did in June). They also decided to room together, but vowed not to discuss strategies or strokes in the dorm. “We don’t talk about tennis too much because we have a non-tennis-playing roommate who would probably kill us if we did,” Kalvaria says.

Their plan hit one roadblock: in January, Kalvaria contracted an eye infection that blurred her vision for about six weeks. “She kept playing, but it was very scary because she wasn’t really seeing the ball at all,” recalls Forood, ’78. But Kalvaria recovered by the time Pac-10 play began, and she and Lastra finished the season with a 34-3 record. At the NCAAs, the two had a home-court advantage—knowing when the shadows come up and which way the wind blows—but mostly, they knew each other’s strengths.

“Gabby and I have been playing together for so long that we kind of know what shots we can hit and what shots we need to cover,” Kalvaria says. “So there’s not too much thinking that goes on during a doubles match.” Just a lot of good groundstrokes.

WATER POLO

Second Chance, First Place

THE WOMEN'S WATER POLO TEAM knows all about redemption.

Last year the Cardinal seemed destined to win the sport’s first-ever ncaa championship. The setting was perfect: Stanford entered the tournament ranked No. 1 after an undefeated season. The team boasted a slate of stars, including Brenda Villa, a member of the 2000 U.S. Olympic team and the sport’s dominant player. And the Cardinal got the home advantage, swimming before a partisan crowd at the Avery Aquatic Center. But UCLA scored the winning goal with just over a minute remaining in the championship game, robbing Stanford of that big win.

This year, the odds of coming out on top seemed much longer. Seven players graduated from that strong 2001 squad. Then Stanford lost a crucial league championship game—to UCLA—on April 28, just two weeks before the NCAAs. And the Cardinal had to play the final game against the Bruins in their home pool. Still, the players managed to pull out an 8-4 victory in the May 12 game, earning the national title. Six of the seven who graduated last year were in Los Angeles to see the match.

“We had a great feeling from the beginning,” said head coach John Tanner after the win. “We dominated the game for the first quarter-and-a-half, but we continued to make plays. We were anchored by [goalie] Jackie [Frank], who was the key to the win. Despite everything that has happened in the last few weeks, it all came together for us today.”

Stanford took an early lead, scoring four goals in the first quarter. In all, six different players—Ellen Estes, ’02, Julie Gardner, ’03, Jeanine Jackson, ’04, Kelty Luber, ’05, Villa, ’02, and Wendy Watkins, ’04—scored for the Cardinal. Frank, ’02, who was named the tournament MVP and Division I player of the year, made 12 saves.

Stanford lost three players to graduation in June: Margie Dingeldein, Kate Pettit and Estes, a first-team All-American and former Olympian. But All-Americans Villa and Frank will be back. And ready for a repeat.

Sports Notebook

The Ultimate Honor
Bloodthirsty, the demurely named men’s ultimate frisbee team captained by Mike “Whit” Whitaker, ’01, MS ’02, threw accurately and caught everything in reach to win the Ultimate Players Association College Championships May 26 in Spokane, Wash. Seeded first among the nation’s 275 college teams, Bloodthirsty defeated third-seeded Wisconsin 15-5 in the finals to bring home the first men’s national championship for Stanford since 1984. In the women’s finals, third-seeded Superfly, captained by Erin “Peedoo” Percival, ’02, earned Stanford’s second straight national runner-up finish for the women, falling to UC-San Diego’s Psychos 7-15 in the finals.

For Women’s Gymnastics, a Super-Six Finish
The women’s gymnastics squad placed sixth, with a score of 196.025, at the NCAAs, held in Tuscaloosa, Ala., April 18-20. It was the first “Super Six” finish in team history. Three sophomores represented the Cardinal in the individual event finals: Lise Léveillé finished sixth on balance beam at 9.838, Kendall Beck took eighth place on vault with a score of 9.7630, and Lindsay Wing earned 12th place on beam at 9.750. Beck was named to the first All-America team and Léveillé to the second.

What a Crew
The women’s lightweight crew team finished its first season undefeated in dual meets and, on May 18, won the Pacific Coast Rowing Championships at Lake Natoma in Rancho Cordova, Calif., crossing the finish line 20 seconds ahead of UC-Santa Barbara. The team then placed sixth at the IRA Championships held May 29-31 in Cherry Hill, N.J. “Considering that eight of the nine athletes had no prior rowing experience, I think they went further than anyone could have imagined,” head coach Al Acosta said after the IRA regatta. The women’s open-weight team, meanwhile, received its first-ever bid to the NCAA championships, held May 31 through June 2 in Indianapolis, Ind. The Cardinal finished 10th.

Feeling the Draft
NFL teams selected six Stanford seniors in the first seven rounds of the draft. On the first day, the Tennessee Titans took free safety Tank Williams with the 45th pick overall, and the Buffalo Bills chose linebacker Coy Wire in the third round. Later rounds sent quarterback Randy Fasani to the Carolina Panthers, running back Brian Allen to the Indianapolis Colts, offensive guard Eric Heitmann to the San Francisco 49ers and center Zack Quaccia to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The NFL has drafted six Stanford players on six previous occasions—and selected seven in 1936—but never in so few rounds.

LACROSSE

A League of Their Own

"IS THERE ICING?" one guy in the bleachers wanted to know. “’Cause it sure looks like ice hockey.”

A team dad turned around and handed the man a program for the game being played under the lights on Maloney Field. “Here,” the father said. “Read this.”

It’s true. The program handed out at women’s lacrosse games contains a guidebook, designed to uncloak a sport that is still something of a mystery for many West Coast spectators. The flyer includes answers to Frequently Asked Questions (“Yes, the players must stop on the whistle” and “No, there are no hard boundaries”) and a diagram of the soccer-size field that sketches out the crease, hashes, 8-meter fans and restraining lines.

“The most typical question we get is, ‘Is that field hockey?’” says head coach Michele Uhlfelder, a U.S. national team member since 1991. “But hockey’s a ground game, and we’re trying to move the ball down the field in the air, with the same speed as you’d see in an ice-hockey puck.”

The mustard-yellow balls often sizzle past helmeted, thickly padded goalkeepers at 75 to 80 miles per hour. But do the other 10 players on the field wear protective gear? Nah. That’s for the men’s game, which allows some stick and body contact.

Lacrosse is one of the fastest-growing women’s sports in the nation, with 40 new college varsity teams added since 1995. And Stanford aims to be the flagship West Coast program. “Our goal is to qualify for the NCAAs and help grow the game nationally,” Uhlfelder says. “We’d like to put a stick in everyone’s hand at a young age.”

A former vice president of the U.S. Women’s Lacrosse Association and current board member of USLacrosse, Uhlfelder was a four-year starter at the University of Maryland and played in World Cup competitions in Japan and England. She coached at Duke and Old Dominion before coming to Stanford two years ago, when she led the Cardinal to a fourth straight Western Women’s Lacrosse League championship.

But this year the varsity women withdrew from the WWLL, which included college club teams, and played in a new federation. Spearheaded by Uhlfelder, the Mountain Pacific Lacrosse League includes four Division I teams—St. Mary’s, Denver, UC-Berkeley and Stanford—and Division II UC-Davis. The Cardinal women won the first-ever MPLL conference title with a perfect conference record of 10-0 (11-7 overall). If the new league can add two more varsity teams—UCLA and USC are good candidates—it will become a viable ncaa conference.

“We played more East Coast teams this year, and I think we turned some heads,” says team co-captain Liz Britt, ’02, a New Jersey native. “Right,” adds Katie Grube, ’04. “We showed that West Coast lacrosse is becoming something to take seriously.”

The women meditate on the field before each practice, but once they turn their attention to scoring goals, they shift into warp speed. Cradling the ball in netted racquets with titanium shafts, attackers throw lightning-fast passes behind their backs and dart behind the goal to feed scoring shots. Defenders sprint like crazy to double-team the player who has possession of the ball, yelling “Ball! Ball!” in her face to help their teammates keep track of where it is in the blur of runners.

The varsity women are keen on the history of their game, which most closely resembles the Native American stickball contest that was used to settle tribal controversies. Players would compete for weeks at a time on fields that were several acres wide and long, using trees for goals, tree limbs for sticks, and dung-and-deerskin balls.

Lacrosse originated with tribes in the eastern half of North America, which helps explain why the powerhouse schools in the sport are still mostly on the Eastern Seaboard. But as Stanford’s national standing continues to improve, Uhlfelder is finding more athletes “who are interested in schools beyond the Mississippi.” This year, Stanford also hosted the first deBeer East-West Challenge, inviting Syracuse University out to play on Parents’ Weekend before a crowd of about 600. The Cardinal lost, 15-9. But, as they do after every game, the team members ran to the sidelines and clapped in appreciation of their supportive fans in the bleachers.

TRACK AND FIELD

At the NCAAs, Several Strong Performances

LAUREN FLESHMAN earned her place in the Stanford record books in May when she crossed the line of the women’s 5,000-meter race with a time of 15:53.91, winning the NCAA championship for the second straight year. Having won the NCAA indoor 3,000-meter crown in March, she became the third Cardinal woman to earn two NCAA track and field titles in the same year, running in step with Jackie Edwards, ’92, and Chryste Gaines, ’92.

It wasn’t easy, however. “I kept getting bumped almost over the rail,” said Fleshman, ’03, after the race. “A couple of times I thought I was going to go off the track, but I kept my focus and hung in there.”

After leading their team to third place in the Pac-10, the 13 women who competed at the NCAAs in steamy Baton Rouge, La., finished in seventh place overall. Shot-putter Jillian Camarena, ’04, captured third place with a personal-best throw of 55 feet, 1 inch, and Kathleen Donoghue, ’03, finished fourth in the pole vault.

In the men’s competition, Donald Sage captured the 1,500-meter national title with a time of 3:42.65. “I didn’t really get as great a position as I wanted during the first half of the race,” said Sage, ’04, after crossing the line. “I felt really good with about 50 meters to go and I could feel the other runners coming on the last 25 meters, so I was just telling myself to hang on.” Sage paced the men’s team to eighth place—its fifth top-eight finish in a row. Michael Ponikvar, ’02, was third in the high-jump competition.

Twelve student-athletes were named All-Americans: Camarena, Donoghue, Fleshman, Ponikvar, Sage, Maurica Carlucci, ’02 (1,500 meters), Seth Hejny, ’03 (5,000 meters), Omer Inan, ’03 (discus), Louis Luchini, ’03 (10,000 meters), Jonathon Riley, ’01 (5,000 meters), Adam Tenforde, ’03 (10,000 meters), and Jesse Thomas, ’02 (3,000 meters). A school-record 24 athletes competed at the meet.