When Kristie Ahntook the court in the deciding match of the women’s tennis national championship May 21, it marked the climax of one of the great runs in collegiate tennis history.
No women’s tennis team had ever triumphed from Stanford’s lowly 12th seed. But after running through No. 5 USC and No. 4 Georgia, the Cardinal defeated No. 1 Florida in the semifinals, and fans held their breath. By the time the Cardinal entered the NCAA final against No. 3 Texas A&M, the team was taking on the look of destiny. Still, it came down to the last moments. What they needed was for Ahn—a junior who had missed most of sophomore year due to injury—to win one more.
In other words, Stanford women’s tennis hardly needed a backstory for excitement. But it had one. This game was bigger than them. Hanging in the balance was “the streak,” Stanford’s unrivaled stretch of 36 consecutive years with at least one NCAA team championship.
The unheralded span of glory already seemed impossibly long. Twice the age of the tennis team’s youngest players, it spanned the Ford administration to the Obama years, not to mention bellbottoms to skinny jeans. By comparison, even Stanford’s string of 18 Director’s Cups looked adolescent.
Only nine Division I schools have ever won 36 championships in total, let alone done so for 36 years in a row in an era of ever-increasing competition.
"The longer it has gone on, the more impressive it becomes only because it’s become so hard to win a championship in anything these days,” says Chris Dorst, ’77, who knows more than most about the streak’s beginning—and its recent near end.
In 1976, the future Olympian’s heroics in goal helped lift the men’s water polo team to its first NCAA championship, the ultimate transformation for a team that had gone winless in Pac-8 play just four years earlier. It also unleashed the streak. Dorst is a living example of what happens in 36 years. A 20-year-old senior topped with a mop of surfer’s hair in 1976, he is now closer to a different kind of senior status, topped with a stately gray and father to three adult daughters. And still the streak continued.
Besides winning his own NCAA title, Dorst married another Stanford champion, Marybeth Linzmeier Dorst, ’85, a member of the 1983 NCAA-winning swim, and fathered one more. His youngest daughter, Emily, ’15, was a goalie on the 2012 NCAA champion women's water polo team.
Dorst remains a presence in his sport, webcasting games for the NCAA. And so it was that on May 12, he had an upfront view of the women’s final between his daughter's No. 2 Stanford water polo team and No. 1 USC. It was more than half way through spring quarter and Stanford still didn’t have a team title. In the minds of many, the powerhouse women's water polo team was the best—and last—chance for the streak to turn 37.
One of the amazing parts of the streak, Dorst says, is there’s always a degree of chance to winning, no matter how prepared, focused and talented a team might be.
When the Cardinal fell in the fifth overtime period of the longest championship game in NCAA history, Stanford’s luck seemed to have finally run out. Dorst had been at the streak’s beginning and he figured he had just seen its end. “Realistically,“ he says, “it seemed like it was over.”
It was an odd feeling. The streak had never been the focus of much attention, and most fans would much prefer a year with a Rose Bowl victory than another year to an unheralded streak. Even Dorst considered it more a fun fact than something to crow about.
But its apparent end was a tad discomfiting. At a campus meeting in May, one Stanford administrator raised the Yale Alumni Magazine featuring its championship hockey team, and quipped how weird it was that the Ivy League school had more NCAA championships this year than Stanford.
There was still hope, of course. The last time the streak had gone so far into the school year without an extension was in 2001, when women’s tennis stepped into the breach. But that team was a behemoth, crushing opponents en route to a perfect 30-0 record.
This year’s tennis team offered no such assurance. An article on the Bootleg, the Stanford online sports forum, gave them just a 4-percent chance of winning it all. “The streak is in grave condition,” one commenter wrote on the site.
But then the women’s tennis team caught fire, going on its unlikely run into the final. In the athletic department, where Dorst works as guest services manager, people cheered at their screens, he says.
. . . At collegiate tennis.
When Ahn let her opponent’s final forehand loop beyond the baseline, she threw her racquet in joy as her teammates rushed her. The news story to most was that the women had won their team’s unprecedented 17th NCAA championship.
But the ladies were quick to nod to history when they tweeted a picture of their championship trophy: “Someone said we still needed an NCAA championship in 2012-13?”
Sam Scott is a senior writer for Stanford.
