Last year, Georgia Tech women’s tennis coach Rodney Harmon resisted pairing then-freshmen Megan Kurey and Kendal Woodard.
“I knew that they would be a good team,” he said, “but they’re such good doubles players, I was just trying to spread the wealth.”
Harmon eventually put them together, the longtime friends gladly accepted. In two seasons, they’ve merely become one of the most accomplished doubles teams Tech has produced. The two will be in the hunt for a national championship when the NCAA men’s and women’s doubles championships begin Thursday at Georgia’s Dan Magill Tennis Complex. They are among four teams seeded 5-8.
“When you get up there, you’re just like, Gotta win,” Woodard said. “There’s something about being in Athens.”
Georgia also has two teams in the 32-team draw, second-seeded Lauren Herring and Maho Kowase and Kate Fuller and Silvia Garcia. Georgia State also has an entry, Masa Grgan and Abigail Tere-Apisah.
Woodard and Kurey have considerable credentials. Last summer, they won the ITA National Collegiate Summer Circuit Championships. They followed it by winning the USTA/ITA National Indoor Intercollegiate Championships in November, giving them the first two national doubles titles won by Tech players.
Tech has one individual NCAA champion, singles champion Amanda McDowell in 2008.
Kurey, from Centennial High, and Woodard, who is from Stockbridge and was home-schooled, make a distinctive pair. Woodard is 6-foot-1, has a powerful service game and likes rap music. Kurey is 5-foot-3, is strong on returns and prefers country. Their friendship dates to their days playing junior tennis across the Southeast. Woodard, in fact, helped persuade Kurey to follow her to Tech after she had committed.
“I was saying, ‘Megan, come on, we can play doubles together,’” Woodard said.
The pairing has been so effective that the two are roommates. They have developed an unspoken understanding of how the other will play different shots and even when a meeting between points is unnecessary.
“Sometimes, we just, like, know, ‘She knows what to do,’ or we know if, like, OK, she’s mad, I’ll just let her chill this point,” Kurey said.
Both players, Harmon said, have good instincts for doubles and “I think they volley probably as well as any doubles team here in this tournament,” she said.
Still, how long their run in Athens lasts is up in the air. They won their 14th consecutive match Feb. 21, at which point they were ranked No. 1 in the country and were 18-4 overall and 9-3 against ranked opponents. Since then, they are 9-6 overall with a 1-6 record against nationally ranked opponents. They are now ranked No. 6 in the country.
They acknowledge that they haven’t always played their best. They’re hopeful that almost two weeks of practice since the Yellow Jackets were eliminated from the NCAA team tournament in the second round has provided rest and the chance to sharpen their game.
Should they win their first two matches, a potential quarterfinal matchup awaits with Georgia’s Herring and Kowase, who have split with Kurey and Woodard this season.
“A lot of it’s who gets on a run and who can sustain the run,” Harmon said. “But if they get going, if they start playing the way they can play, they’re talented enough to win here.”
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