FOREST, Va. – Finishing her first season in the cardinal and grey, Carolina Dirk (Port Aransas, Texas) made history for the Guilford College women's tennis program, becoming the first player in program history to be selected by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference (ODAC) to the All-ODAC First Team in both singles and doubles in the same season, being joined by Erika Mendez (Asheboro, N.C.) in duos play in the league's year-end honors as by the conference offices on Wednesday morning.

In a season filled with storylines of resurgence and renaissance for the Quakers women's tennis program, Dirk's sweep of first team recognition becomes just the latest example of the brilliant first act she put together in Greensboro, but the footnotes of the honor's significance to the program goes deeper than that. GC had not received an All-ODAC honoree since 2012 when, among others, current coach Kim Kleimeier '13 was one-of-four picks to the third team. Beyond that, Guilford has not had a women's tennis player claim All-ODAC First Team honors in over three decades, when Amy Carney '95 was picked in 1995 while the last time a Quakers doubles tandem made the all-conference first team was in 1994, when Betsy Parker '97 and Trudy Buckingham '95 were recognized.

In layman's terms, Dirk completed the greatest season in since the program joined the NCAA ahead of 1991 and one could make an argument that it is the program's best ever. Between singles and doubles, she played 36 total matches, all of them from the Quakers' top flight, and she lost just one of them, a doubles defeat against No. 12 nationally ranked Washington & Lee University. Outside of that, she was flawless atop the Quakers lineup and often times it was not even close. Completing the second undefeated season in women's tennis' program history, the other being Tarja Koho when she went 31-0 in 1982, Dirk tore up the competition, yielding five-or-more games in a match just four times all season when playing singles against the opposition's top option. Along the way, she never dropped a set and required a 13^th game to claim a set just twice. Of her 34 sets won, she claimed a clean, 6-0 sweep 13 times and grabbed a "gentleman's sweep" of a 6-1 tally on another nine occasions while also inducing a pair of retirements by her opponents. In ODAC play, Dirk went 9-0 while completing a 16-0 mark in duals action overall and was thrice named the ODAC Singles Player of the Week. While Mendez was her primary partner for doubles, Ashley Belnap (Winston-Salem, N.C.) was matched up with Dirk a couple times late in the season, and the Lone Star State native did not skip a beat, going 2-0 matches.

The pairing of Dirk and Mendez was nearly as potent as Dirk was individually this year to the point in which they land in the top-two spots in the program record books for single-season doubles win percentage. Mendez's 15-1 mark yielded a .938 win rate that is second-best in the program's history while Dirk tops the charts with a 17-1 record on .944 winning percentage. The duo went 15-1 together, requiring an extra set just once to claim a victory from the top flight against nine wins by 6-2 scores or better. Their lone blemish came to W&L's top duo of Sarah Donnelly and Allie Murrell but beyond that, the Quaker pair dominated. Overall, in duals they finished 15-1 including 7-1 in ODAC action. They were picked as the ODAC Doubles Team of the Week twice.

The 2026 iteration of GC's women's tennis team made their mark, reaching double-digit wins and a winning season for the first time since 2007-08, finishing with a 10-7 record. In ODAC play, they went 6-4, their top mark since 2011-12, finishing north of .500 against conference competition for just the second time since the turn of the century. The result was a league tournament berth as the fifth seed, although they were eliminated by the fourth seeded University of Lynchburg in the opening round.

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