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.
