No. 8 Marrit Boonstra made it all the way to the quarterfinals of the NCAA singles bracket and recorded her 50th career win before finally coming up short.
Her championship run ended at the hands of Miami's Laura Vallverdu. After dropping the first set, the junior bounced back, pushing the 24th-ranked player to a third set by taking a second-set tiebreaker. Vallverdu won the final stanza, closing the book on Boonstra's season with a 6-1, 6-7 (9), 6-3 win. The Miami junior won her semifinal match before bowing out in the final to Duke's Mallory Cecil.
Boonstra started her run to the quartefinals with a turbulent 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (5) first-round win against California's Bojana Bobusic on Wednesday. She continued her march by winning four consecutive sets.
On Thursday, the nation's No. 8 player defeated Georgia Tech's Christy Striplin 6-1, 6-4. Boonstra continued her streak Friday by beating Stanford's No. 7 Hilary Barte 7-5, 6-1.
"She played very good," Boonstra said of Stanford's Barte. "I had to figure out her game, and after that it went pretty easy. She is a great player, but she is half of the size of me, so I was trying to get the balls up higher than her, and it worked. Then I tried to go to the net."
Boonstra and partner Jo Mather advanced to the second round of the doubles bracket before losing to the Arizona State duo of Micaela Hein and Kelcy McKenna 6-4, 1-6, 6-3.
"Marrit played awesome," Mather said of her partner's resilience. "She's played two really long matches already, so for her to come out here and play like that was fantastic."
The No. 25 tandem of Jessica Alexander and Anastasia Revzina, along with the No. 16 men's doubles team of Antoine Benneteau and Joey Burkhardt, suffered first-round defeats.
