Colorado Dominates Day Two at Milwaukee Classic
GLENDALE, Wis. – On the second day of the 50th Annual Milwaukee Classic, Colorado didn’t just survive the grind. It imposed itself on it.
Across a long, stop-start Saturday at the Nicolet Tennis Center, two names kept cutting through the noise: Heidi Crncan and Louise Ternstroem. Between them, they went a perfect 4-0 in singles and added a dominant doubles win, setting the tone for a Buffaloes squad that looked sharper and more assured with every match.
“We made some good adjustments from yesterday,” CU head coach Anthony Pham said. “We took a step forward today, and we want everybody to finish the tournament on a positive note tomorrow.”
Crncan and Ternstroem take charge
Colorado’s day began at 8 a.m. with doubles, and the Buffs came out with purpose. Crncan and Ternstroem dismantled USF’s Sienna Leeson and Josefine Falster 6-1, barely giving the Bulls a look at the match. It was brisk, clean tennis — the kind of performance that sends a message early in a draw.
They couldn’t back it up with a second win, falling 6-1 to LIP’s Deborah Collado Dominguez and Mariia Dolzhenko later in the day, but by then their influence had already spread to singles.
Crncan, a second-year from England, turned her afternoon into a personal showcase. She swept Milwaukee’s Karolina Skowronska 6-1, 6-2, then backed it up with another commanding display against LIP’s Collado Dominguez, winning 6-2, 6-3. Across four sets of singles, she never lost more than three games in a set. That’s not just winning. That’s control.
On the adjacent courts, Ternstroem — the lone newcomer in the Colorado lineup — matched that standard. She dispatched Marquette’s Emmerson White 6-2, 6-3, then dug in against Purdue’s Nehir Dogan. After edging a tight first set 7-5, she blew the match open with a ruthless 6-1 second set to close out a perfect 2-0 singles day.
Energy, Pham wanted. Ternstroem supplied it.
Alexin and Bubalo push a top-15 pair to the brink
If Crncan and Ternstroem were the headline, Lera Alexin and Ema Bubalo were the subplot that said just as much about Colorado’s ceiling.
They opened doubles play by beating Purdue’s Ece Gencer and Dogan 6-3, a solid, composed win that set up a far bigger test: North Carolina’s 14th-ranked duo of Anna Frey and Alanis Hamilton.
The match turned into a knife-edge thriller.
Alexin and Bubalo stood toe-to-toe with one of the nation’s elite pairs, forcing a tiebreak and dragging it into deep waters before UNC finally escaped 7-6 (10). The Buffs pair had match points. They saved match points. They traded blows with a top-15 team and walked off court with a narrow loss but a clear statement.
“They fought off several match points,” Pham said. “That was a highly ranked team. We had match points and fought off several match points. They showed good level and good poise, just unfortunately fell a little short.”
The near-upset seemed to fuel Alexin’s singles response. After a tight 7-6 (3), 6-4 defeat to USF’s Falster, she regrouped and came back strong, rolling past Marquette’s Elise Barnstedt 6-2, 6-2 to close her day on the front foot.
Bubalo’s singles path was even more of a grind. Against Kansas State’s Sabrina Balderrama, she traded sets — 6-3 to Balderrama, 4-6 to Bubalo — before the match came down to a deciding tiebreak set, which Balderrama edged 1-0. The margins were thin, the effort obvious.
One more push in Milwaukee
By the end of the day, Colorado had banked real progress: a doubles sweep to start, a marquee scare against a top-15 UNC team, and four singles wins from Crncan and Ternstroem alone.
Sunday will bring a lighter schedule to close the three-day event. Bubalo and Alexin will team up for one more doubles match, while Crncan and Ternstroem return to singles for their final draws.
The Buffs have already shown they can trade with ranked opposition and close out the matches they’re supposed to win. Now comes the final question of the weekend in Milwaukee: can they finish it with the same edge they found on Saturday?
