Mike Gore's 40-for-40: 1987 Women's Tennis Big South Championship

ASHEVILLE, N.C. - I was so excited to see former Bulldog Henry Patten advance to the French Open doubles a few weeks ago and he and his partner are now the number one doubles team in the world!!

How many collegiate tennis programs can say they have a tennis player who has won at Wimbledon and the Australian Open? And one who is also ranked #1 in the world!!

Not too many and I would expect that even the tradition-rich tennis programs that are located in the state of North Carolina can't top the Bulldog program in that regard.

UNC Asheville has had a pretty good history of winning tennis. The first ever Big South title for the school came from the men's tennis program back in 1986 when the Bulldogs, coached by Asheville native Doug Maynard, won the title at Augusta that Spring.

And today I'd like to look back on the first women's Big South title that came in the school's first year of Division I play a year later. The UNC Asheville women's tennis team in 1987 won a thrilling title held on the Bulldog homecourts.

It was not an easy ride for that Asheville team. There was a coaching change in the middle of the season and local tennis pro Chuck Schilling would be named the program's interim coach for the 1987 season. The Bulldogs had a talented team returning for the 1987 campaign with a nice mixture of experience and youth on the team.

The team was led by seniors' Leslie Knable and Kecia Wilson. Also on the team contributing to the championship were Shannon Burns, Christine Nichols, Becky Parker and Jamie Shipe.
A coaching change in the middle of the season isn't easy for any program and Asheville struggled for a little while. Schilling not only had to get to know a team in the middle of the year but also had to prepare for the first ever Big South Conference Women's Tennis Tournament.
In the early days of the Big South Conference, there was not a lot of help for hosting a conference tournament. Today the league has several people in charge of championships and a notebook set of rules on how a championship is to be run. That simply was not the case in 1987. If you hosted, you made the rules and ran the tournament the way you saw fit.
The format was much different back then. It was not team vs. team as it is today. Instead, the tournament was divided into six flights of singles and three flights of doubles.
And that wasn't determined until the night before the tournament started. It has been a very wet Spring in 1987 and while everybody was supposed to play each other, that hadn't come close to happening.

The coaches would gather together the night before the tournament and try to figure out each flight. It was a very long meeting. However, somehow around 2 a.m. we had each flight figured out as best we could and the tournament would start the following day at 10 a.m.
Asheville had only played a couple of league matches due to the weather and as a result, most of the Bulldog players were really under-seeded. That would work to the Bulldogs' advantage as despite being lower-seeded, every Asheville singles player and doubles team advanced to the semifinals.

The favorite in the tournament appeared to be Winthrop. The Eagles had four great singles players that would win the top four flights of the singles tournament and the top two doubles flights. However, they were a little weak at the fifth and sixth flight.

Asheville was strong across the board and while not too many Bulldogs advanced to the finals, they posted a lot of third-place finishes which would help accumulate points in the tournament.
One Asheville player did advance to the finals and it was a little bit of a surprise. Sophomore Candi Earwood, who had originally come to UNC Asheville as a basketball player, had rolled to the finals in the sixth flight.

She would play for a championship on a blustery cold afternoon at the UNC Asheville Tennis Center. Candi would get the job done and win the Bulldogs' first ever singles championship in straight sets.

As I was adding up the points, it looked like Asheville was going to win the tournament handily. Winthrop had done very well but wasn't quite as balanced as the Bulldogs. However, as I was doing my calculations, I also noticed that Coastal Carolina's team was also a good squad from top to bottom.

In the end, UNC Asheville would win by one point over the Chanticleers. Winthrop would take third. The Bulldogs' balance had accumulated 47 points, with Coastal right behind at 46. The former basketball player, Candi Earwood, had put Asheville on top.

Chuck Schilling was named Big South Coach of the Year and the Bulldogs would begin a tennis dynasty.

There were some grumblings about the scoring format but the coaches had agreed to it before the tournament.

Asheville would win the tournament the next two years with a different scoring format and some new and talented players plus returnees from the 1987 title team. But the first one would always be a memorable one. The team that had faced adversity during the year, kept plugging along and in the end would win a championship.

University of North Carolina Ashville Athletics

Mike Gore's 40-for-40: 1987 Women's Tennis Big South Championship

Related News

Related Videos