Watching the Michigan women's tennis team this weekend was much like watching a movie for the 20th time. You knew what was going to happen, but you just had to keep watching.
The Wolverines improved to 9-0 in the Big Ten with huge wins over Minnesota and Iowa. How huge? Michigan didn't lose a single match the entire weekend.
The two conference victories gave the Wolverines a regular-season Big Ten title, but the conference war is not over just yet. The Big Ten title will be determined at the Big Ten championships in West Lafayette starting April 24. The regular season serves only to seed the teams in the tournament.
With the record they have right now, the Wolverines should be the No. 1 seed in the tournament.
"There's still a full week of tennis to play in the Big Ten," Michigan coach Bitsy Ritt said. "But it looks like we'll be the one to beat."
The conference title would be something that Michigan has never experienced before. Indiana has dominated the Big Ten for the past 15 years, winning all but three of the titles in that span. The closest the Wolverines came to the title was when they were the runner-up to the Hoosiers in 1994.
The Wolverines started off their weekend against Minnesota on Saturday. As always, all eyes were on the No. 1 spot of senior Sarah Cyganiak against freshman Nora Suaska. The match-up pitted Cyganiak, No. 44 in the nation, against the 48th-ranked freshman who held a 21-1 record entering the weekend and was named Big Ten athlete of the month for February.
Cyganiak didn't seem too impressed with Suaska, as she won, 6-3, 7-5, and improved her team-leading record to 14-3 overall and 8-0 in the Big Ten.
The rest of the match also went according to plan, as all the other Wolverines posted victories.
Freshman Brooke Hart won her 20th match of the season, against the Gophers, and maintained her tie for the team lead with the identical record as Cyganiak.
Also picking up her 20th victory was freshman Erryn Weggenman.
Sunday, Iowa rolled in and suffered the same fate that the Gophers did. With their second sweep of the weekend, the Wolverines earned their ninth conference win in impressive fashion.
The match ended with sophomore Tumeka Harris battling Iowa's Erin Wolverton almost 1 1/2 hours after all the other matches were over.
With her iced-up teammates watching and cheering on, Harris finished off the grueling three-set match by blanking Wolverton in the third-set tie-breaker.
"She really played hard, and her level of play increased as the match went on," Ritt said.
Freshman Danielle Lund cruised by her opponent, 6-1, 6-0, and won her 10th-straight match. She has not lost a match since the Wolverines fell to Wake Forest over a month ago. Lund now has the second-best conference mark on the team: 8-1.
Team leaders Cyganiak and Hart kept pushing up their win totals with their 15th dual-match victories and improved their conference marks to 9-0.
Cyganiak teamed up with junior Sora Moon as they won both their doubles matches and are now 8-1 in the conference. The win against Minnesota marked their 25th victory of the season.
Also sporting an 8-1 conference record in doubles are Weggenman and redshirt freshman Jen Boylan. The two are now 12-6 in dual matches and are tied with the upperclassmen for the team lead in doubles.
The two victories seem to have Michigan primed for the tournament to begin. But the Wolverines are trying not to get ahead of themselves with Penn State still remaining on their schedule.
"The focus all year has been to concentrate on what we have coming up," Ritt said. "We try not to think about the tournament. We're just concentrating on Penn State."
But with the way that the Wolverines have handled the rest of the Big Ten so far this season, maybe they can afford to take a peek at the tournament.
"This group has really worked hard all year and they've been focused," Ritt said. "And if we continue to focus on the small things, then that's really all we can do."
Apparently, that attention to detail has been beneficial to Michigan. The Wolverines' 9-0 Big Ten record is the best they have ever had in the conference.
The only other time they finished the regular season without a conference loss was in 1975. That year, their conference record was 2-0 and it earned the Wolverines a fifth-place finish.
This season's undefeated mark is a little more impressive. With one more conference match still to play before Big Tens, the Wolverines don't want to get ahead of themselves. Then again, they're the only ones left who can.
JEANNIE SERVAAS/Daily
Erryn Weggenman and the rest of the women's tennis team won their first-ever regular-season Big Ten title with wins over Minnesota and Iowa this weekend.