First of all, the blog has to apologize - due to operator error, the video of Dan Regan's match point of Armstrong's 5-2 win over West Florida is unviewable. However, we did catch a rare feat in the women's match as Natasa Vukovic's match point in the Pirates' 5-2 win over Hawaii Pacific was on the video. In a second-set tiebreak, Vukovic's opponent, Lea Kruse-Utermann, called a ball out on 6-4 in the tiebreaker, but the chair umpire overruled the call, giving Vukovic and the Pirates the win.
The national semifinals are the first time in the tournament in which chair umpires are on each singles match - once you reach the Round of 16, you have chair umpires on each doubles matches but they still use roving officials until you get down to four teams. Today we had two matches ended on overrules by the officials - Georgi Rumenov's singles win over West Florida's Bruno Savi ended similarly - but it is quite rare to see that happen for match point to end a team match. Again, had the match been played in the quarters or the Round of 16.. the women's match might still be going on now!
Nevertheless, the Pirates are back in the national championship match for a 13th time in school history, where No. 3 BYU Hawaii awaits in a rematch of last year's championship match. For you numerology fans, the number 7 has a big significance in tomorrow's match. Armstrong has won 7 NCAA Division II national championships in women's tennis. So has BYU Hawaii, which is tied for tops in NCAA DII history. The meeting on Saturday will be the seventh time that the two teams have met for the title as each school has won three previous meetings.
Today's match started later because of the four-plus hour men's match preceding it. Doubles was less than an hour - big wins by Aleksandra Filipovski and Barbora Krtickova at No. 1 doubles and Marlen Hacke and Olga Kalodzitsa at No. 2 doubles. Singles wins went in straight sets to Filipovski and Hacke and Vukovic's match winner finished in that second set tiebreak. BYU Hawaii won over Abilene Christian, 5-2, in a match that essentially lasted the same amount of time as the Pirates' match, they just finished quicker because the Barry men's match was quicker.
Live video of both national championship matches will again be on NCAA.com, and live stats will continue. Be forewarned - if the live stats aren't updating deep into the match, it might be because the blog is trying to get video of match point. We don't want a duplicate of what happened today !
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