Dartmouth women’s tennis player and Manhasset native Katherine Yau was named to the All-Ivy Second Team earlier this month.
Yau, a freshman, won 18 singles matches over the course of the year and went 4-3 in conference play, defeating Princeton’s Lindsay Graff and Yale’s Elizabeth Epstein, who each earned unanimous First Team All-Ivy honors, as part of three straight conference wins late in the year.
Yau is the first Dartmouth freshman to earn All-Ivy honors since Sarah Leonard was named to the second team in 2009.
“As a freshman, I definitely looked up to the seniors to keep us organized and it gave me the confidence to be a leader going forward,” Yau said.
Yau had a team-high six-match winning streak during the year and competed at the No. 1 position in six of her seven conference matches.
Playing at the junior level, Yau was ranked as high as No. 1 in the United States Tennis Association’s eastern section rankings and won five sectional tournaments prior to arriving at Dartmouth.
“Katherine is very disciplined, a very clean ball-striker who competes well and has a very strong mind,” said Viktor Marinkovic, Yau’s trainer at Robbie Wagner’s Tournament Training Center in Glen Cove, where she’s trained since she was 10 years old. “That would probably be the best part of her game, her mental make-up.”
Though she attended Manhasset High School, Yau did not compete on the school’s tennis team, as players do not earn United States Tennis Association rankings in high school play.
Because of this, Yau said she had never played team tennis until arriving at Dartmouth, and needed some time to get used to the college game and the intensity that follows every serve.
“In juniors, you focus on yourself, and in college you have teammates next to you cheering you on and you’re cheering them on,” Yau said. “In juniors, I didn’t really have that. I had my parents, sure, but never really any teammates. They gave me the confidence to compete at my level and give the team a chance to win.”
Yau visited other Ivy League schools, but said she fell in love with Dartmouth after taking an informal visit in March 2011, during her junior year of high school.
“I fell in love with it right away,” Yau said. “I didn’t know much about Dartmouth at first, but it really seemed like a place where I could see myself going to college. It was the right size compared to a school like Cornell and Columbia was too close to home and I didn’t want to go to school in the city.”
Yau won her first singles match in conference play April 6 against Cornell at the team’s No. 3 position and was bumped to No. 1 in her second match against Nicole Bartnik of Columbia, which she lost.
“She’s a great player,” Yau said. “I wasn’t ready for that.”
Yau dropped her next match to Penn’s Sol Eskenazi, who Yau said she had defeated while on the junior circuit, before her three-match streak against Princeton, Yale and Brown.
“[The win over Princeton] was very close,” Yau said. “It could have gone either way, but it gave me so much more confidence going into those next matches, and I think it gave the team confidence in competing against all these Ivy League teams and that we’re much better than our record indicated.”
