Easterns success for W. Tennis

Penn sophomore Anastasia Pozdniakova won the title for the second consecutive year. He wanted it to be noted that what had happened this past weekend was not a sign. It was not an omen, and it definitely was not a portent of any great victories or stunning defeats to come. Penn women's tennis coach Mike Dowd is certain that none of the mystical forces announcers, sports writers and coaches believe rule over the athletic world were present this weekend at the Eastern Collegiates where Penn met host Princeton four times in a field of over 20 teams. "It happens every year," said Dowd, refuting what many believed was the work of a strange alignment of the planets over western New Jersey. "The two of us are among the best teams there, so we generally meet each other." Perhaps, Dowd didn't want to believe fate was at work because Penn dropped three of four matches to the team that finished four spots behind them in the Ivy League ranking last season. "This just shows you how strong the entire league is," Dowd said. "Every team is going to have a lot of depth this year." Despite Dowd's words to the contrary, fate had to be at work in bringing Penn freshman Shuba Srinivasan to Princeton for the second college match of her career. It's wasn't that she was there on that day, but that this particular tournament was also the second one played in last year by another Penn player from abroad. Easterns was the scene of now-sophomore Anastasia Pozdniakova's second tournament for Penn. This year, Pozdniakova won the Eastern Collegiates singles title by beating Anna Monhartova of St. John's, 6-3, 6-3, in the final. The slim, blond-haired sophomore had grown up in the heart of communist Russia where the Kremlin was a 15-minute drive within her hometown. She was a product of the Soviet approach to athletics -- to educate the most talented as rigorously as possible and leave the rest to their own devices. "They started with 50, then went to 20 and then eventually 10," she said. "Only those 10 would have a chance to play in the club, get instruction and further their careers." She described a system that would seem curious to any tennis player bred on the public courts of Main Street U.S.A. "There are no clubs or instructors for the people who didn't make it," Pozdniakova said. "There were courts for them to play on but no high school teams and no other place to get any better." But the story that would unfold last weekend was far too promising at that early point for fate to let it end, and Pozdniakova would become one of the 10 to gain entrance to the national team that traveled the world in the coming years. When the Soviet system collapsed, her father, a tennis enthusiast himself, got an invitation to coach at an American racquet club. She would end up in Morris County, N.J., by the beginning of her junior year in high school, and would go on to win Easterns her freshman year at Penn. She would also witness fellow freshman Elana Gold's loss to Princeton in a doubles match that would haunt her friend throughout the summer. Meanwhile, a high school senior in India was deciding what to do with her college career. Srinivasan had had a friend that had chosen an American university and she liked the idea of studying abroad. So she wrote Dowd a letter introducing herself and her intention of playing tennis at an American university. Perhaps led by fate, Dowd and then-coach Cissie Leary asked the college hopeful to come to Penn. They arrived this year to Princeton and proceeded to add yet another twist to the story. Pozdniakova won her division as she did last year and Srinivasan would advance to the quarterfinals before losing to a Tigers player. Gold managed to meet the same woman from Princeton served her that haunting loss in 1996. Then again, Srinivasan didn't win her division as Pozdniakova had the season before, and she had not spent time in the states as her Russian friend from New Jersey had in the years leading up to the tournament. In fact, she had never even seen American soil until she stepped off the plane that had brought her from India. And Gold, who Dowd made a point of saying was very impressive this weekend, couldn't pull off the revenge match against the victor from the previous year, losing 6-4, 7-5. Maybe Dowd was right, saying it wasn't fate that was responsible for what took place this past weekend. Maybe the forces that sports writers love to talk of as responsible for those great defeats and stunning victories are nothing more than happenstance. Then again, as Pozdniakova, Gold and Srinivasan boarded the bus, three friends from three different parts of the world, laughing and joking in friendship about the day's proceedings, maybe it wasn't chance.