UNC-Chapel Hill’s Jones and Scotty advance to NCAA tennis doubles final
Jones and Scotty join 2007 national champions Jenna Long and Sara Anundsen as the only two doubles teams in Tar Heel history to reach the NCAA final.
North Carolina women’s tennis players Makenna Jones and Elizabeth Scotty advanced to the finals of the NCAA Doubles Championship after winning a semifinals match on Thursday afternoon from the USTA National Campus.
Seeded fourth in the field, Jones and Scotty took out No. 12 Alana Smith and Anna Rogers of NC State, 6-3, 6-4, to become just the second Carolina doubles team to ever reach the national championship match.
Jones and Scotty will take on No. 19 Kylie Collins and Lulu Sun from the University of Texas in the national title match on Friday. Earlier in the week, the Longhorn freshman duo knocked out Carolina’s second-seeded team of Sara Daavettila and Cameron Morra in the Round of 16.
Sara Daavettila, the top seed in the singles field, fell to No. 3 seed Emma Navarro of Virginia in a semifinal match that lasted over two and a half hours under the hot Florida sun. Navarro, the ACC’s top freshman in 2021, took the opening set, 6-4, but Daavettila, the league’s player of the year, answered back with a 6-2 win in the second set. However, Navarro was too much in a third set that finished, 6-2.
The Williamston, Michigan, native wraps up her five years in Chapel Hill with one of the most impressive resumes in program history. She joins Hayley Carter as the only two players to ever receive seven ITA All-America awards, and is the only player to earn more than one Most Outstanding Player award at the ITA National Team Indoor Championships. Daavettila did it three times.
The fifth-year senior won four ACC Championships, three ITA indoor national championships and helped guide the 2019 and 2021 teams to the NCAA Team Championship semifinals.
Daavettila’s 149 singles wins are second to Carter’s ACC record 168 victories in Tar Heel lore. She is just the fifth Carolina player to reach the NCAA semifinals, joining a list that includes Cinda Gurney (1993), Jamie Loeb (2015), Carter (2016) and Cameron Morra (2019).
Daavettila, who remains a strong candidate for the ITA National Player of the Year award, finishes 2021 with a 22-2 overall singles record. She earned All-America plaudits in both singles and doubles.
Jones and Scotty, now 17-2 this spring, join 2007 national champions Jenna Long and Sara Anundsen as the only two doubles teams in Tar Heel history to reach the NCAA final.
