Chloe's Way
Beck's Stellar Season Leads Duke to ACC Title, NCAA Semis
Jim Sumner, GoDuke The Magazine
Jamie Ashworth knows what a championship tennis team looks like. After all, he has coached the Duke women’s team into the NCAA Tournament every year since becoming head coach in the middle of the 1997 season (excluding 2020’s canceled campaign) and led Duke to the 2009 NCAA outdoor title and the 2003 and 2014 ITA indoor championships.
Ashworth’s 2022 team certainly had the look of a champion, enjoying several major accomplishments including Duke’s first ACC Tournament title since 2012. Duke then entered the NCAA Tournament as the third seed nationally, on an eight-match winning streak, and dispatched Quinnipiac, Old Dominion and Georgia to advance to the national quarterfinals in Champaign, Ill.
There, the Blue Devils edged sixth-ranked N.C. State 4-3 to earn the program’s 11th berth in the national semifinals (ninth under Ashworth), where the season came to a heartbreaking close with a 4-3 loss to No. 2 Oklahoma, one step short of the NCAA title match.
You need talent, of course, to put together a 23-4 championship-caliber season such as this one. And Duke had plenty of talent. There’s Georgia Drummy, a lefthander who transferred to Duke from Vanderbilt. Her gritty come-from-behind, three-set win keyed Duke’s tense NCAA win over Georgia. Senior Kelly Chen is a seasoned veteran taking advantage of her covid-generated extra year. She picked up the clinching win in the NCAA battle with N.C. State. Emma Jackson and Ellie Coleman are precocious freshmen. Sophomore Karolina Berankova is a doubles specialist. She and Drummy earned invites to the doubles competition at the NCAAs. Senior Margaryta Bilokin and grad transfer Eliza Omirou (from Wake Forest) gave Duke valuable points in both singles and doubles.
But Ashworth says talent isn’t always enough.
“The best teams that we’ve had here, results-wise, are teams that really appreciate one other and are willing to play for one another. This team definitely has that. Maybe ball-striking those weren’t the best teams. But they were the best teams as far as I’m-going-to-do-everything-I-can-to-help-my-team and everybody understanding what their role is for that day. Not a lot of drama issues. This team definitely fits that bill.”
There’s something else that Ashworth didn’t mention. Nothing makes a coach’s job easier than coaching a team whose most talented player also is that team’s hardest worker.
Which brings us to Chloe Beck.
Her parents Mike and Debbie met while playing tennis at Emory University and operate the Beck Tennis Academy in the Athens (Georgia) suburbs. Debbie Beck was an assistant at the University of Georgia for 10 years. In fact Ashworth coached against her in his first year assisting Jody Hyden at Duke. The teams met early in the 1995 season, with Georgia edging Duke 5-4 after Duke led 4-2. Ashworth calls that match his introduction to big-time college women’s tennis.
Ashworth says he and Debbie Beck ran into each other on the recruiting trail with some regularity.
Debbie Beck left college coaching to spend more time with her family — Chloe and son Nick.
Chloe says she can’t remember a time when she didn’t have a racket in her hand. She says she probably started playing seriously around age four. But she emphasizes that there was no pressure. She gave basketball a try but says “tennis was always my main focus.”
Both parents taught her, each focusing on different aspects of the game.
She quickly outgrew the Georgia junior circuit. She won the 2015 girls clay court national title doubles championship and teamed with current Virginia star Emma Navarro to capture the 2019 Junior French Open doubles championship.
The duo also finished runnerup in Australia the same year.
“It just seemed like the people who were playing at a high level just started playing these ITF tournaments so it was only natural to start playing them myself,” she says of her international success.
Ashworth recalls recruiting at the Easter Bowl in Palm Springs when he ran into Debbie Beck. She wasn’t coaching at the collegiate level any more, so she wasn’t recruiting.
“What are you doing here?” he wondered out loud.
That’s how Jamie Ashworth found out that Debbie Beck had a tennis-playing daughter. Ashworth kept a close eye on Chloe Beck from then on.
It helped that Beck was an outstanding student who had no desire to turn pro early.
“I always wanted to play college tennis,” she says. “I always liked the team aspect of it. You don’t have that in junior tennis or pro tennis. I value the community aspect of it and playing for something bigger than myself.”
Ashworth saw her wearing Duke blue, but Beck took her time.
“Academically and off the court, Duke was always a great fit for her,” Ashworth says. “She’s someone who’s very deliberate with her decisions and took a long time to make a decision. She felt comfortable with the entire community. She’s someone who likes to think things out. That’s her personality.”
Ashworth says that personality plays out in her preparation habits.
“She’s very methodical in her preparation, which allows her to trust that preparation when she plays, to play free and enjoy the moment she’s in.”
Beck agrees.
“In practice, I’m very careful and methodical in my decision-making off the court and in the preparation I put into my matches and practices. But when I go out there the best thing I can do for myself is just trust my training and leave my head off the court and trust that my feet and arms are going to do the right thing.”
All that methodical preparation turns into creative shot-making in matches.
“I like having fun with my practices and my matches and that’s my personality in general. I think that carried over into tennis, trying new things and experimenting with my game.”
Beck had a spectacular fall 2019 campaign to start her Duke career and seemed poised for a great 2020 spring. But covid-19 shut down college sports and sent everyone home.
Beck had earned her high school degree from Laurel Springs Online School so she didn’t have much trouble transitioning back to on-line learning. But she says she missed her new community.
“It was definitely tough. I was enjoying my first college season. But I came back stronger. I learned that no day is given to you. Anything can happen.”
Beck and Berankova made ITA doubles All-America in 2021, as Duke advanced to the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals.
Which brings us back to the 2022 season. With a blend of talented veterans and talented newcomers, Duke began the season ranked in the national top 15 and never dropped out.
The Blue Devils started off 11-1, but Ashworth began to see some signs of slippage. Duke went to Tallahassee and lost 4-2 to a good but not elite Florida State program on March 25.
“That Florida State loss was the turning point in our season. If we had gone on and won that match, I think our mentality leaving Florida State would have been a little different. We ended up losing that match and we had a meeting on the court and things were said that needed to be said, making sure that everyone was on the same page as to what we were buying into, what we needed to do as a team. That loss may have been the best thing that happened to us all year.”
That on-court meeting was players only and the strongest voice came from Beck, who says her message was “the importance of giving 100 percent every time you’re on the court. That’s something that’s in everyone’s control.”
Beck is the team’s most talented player; she’s ranked ninth nationally and had an 19-match singles winning streak earlier this season. She and Drummy earned spots in the NCAA singles tournament following the team competition, and she was one of the top 16 seeds.
But that’s not the only reason her voice is so respected.
“The biggest strength that she has is what she brings to practice every day,” Ashworth says. “There’s a million things going on in these student-athletes’ lives and probably better than anyone we’ve ever had, the time she’s on the court is 100 percent committed to being on the court. She pushes her teammates. People want to hit with her because she’s 100 percent committed. People want to hit with her because they know they’re going to get pushed. It’s unbelievably rare for Chloe to take a day off.”
Duke followed the FSU loss with a 4-3 loss to then ninth-ranked Miami. But Ashworth says he loved his team’s fight in that tight match.
Duke didn’t lose again until the NCAA semis. They came back from Florida and defeated then second-ranked N.C. State in Raleigh, despite losing the doubles point. Two weeks later they defeated then top-ranked North Carolina 5-2. Wins over Miami and Virginia keyed that ACC Tournament title.
Ashworth says Beck led the way.
“We dug our heels in and fought through some adversity. We could have gone one of two ways. There was an easy way and there was a hard way and these guys choose to go the harder way, which has allowed us to be where we are today. The N.C. State win showed that what we were doing was right.”
Beck says “all of our goals were process goals. Our focus on little goals led to the results we’ve had.”
“We’ve done a really good job of focusing on what is in front of us,” Ashworth said in the middle of the NCAA run. “If we go out and if we are mentally, physically and emotionally invested in this match and someone beats us, then we say ‘great’ and go out there and shake hands and say ‘good match.’”
Beck heard ‘“good match” more than a few times during her stellar junior season. Heading into the NCAA singles draw, she had amassed a 33-10 record playing at the top of the Duke lineup. She had eight wins over ranked foes and was 13-0 during the ACC regular season, making her the first undefeated Blue Devil in conference play since 2018. She also was voted to the Academic All-District team, which places her on the ballot for Academic All-America.
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