Record setter Annie Davies

Name: Annie Davies Sports: Tennis Class: Senior Hometown: Parkersburg, W.Va. Age: 21 Age she… Name: Annie Davies Sports: Tennis Class: Senior Hometown: Parkersburg, W.Va. Age: 21 Age she started playing: 11

Annie Davies doesn’t like to lose, even if it doesn’t happen that often.

The senior set the bar last week for the highest total of singles and doubles wins combined in Panther tennis, but she faced the toughest competition of her career just nine days before her record-smashing day against Villanova April 3.

A March 25 match tested Davies to the extreme in a three-and-a-half-hour game against Seton Hall’s Danielle Viola. After two sets of intense play, their third set stood at a tie until Davies dropped the match in the tie-breaker.

“I felt like I let the team down,” she said of the match, adding that the 2-6, 7-6, 7-6 outcome couldn’t have been any closer.

But she bounced back in her matches following the showdown with Viola as she racked up four more wins to set her score at 63 doubles titles and 63 singles games.

“I’m a very competitive person,” she said. “It’s important to bounce back, and my competitive nature makes me keep playing.”

And this isn’t the first time Davies has stood out in a tennis program. In high school, she was the West Virginia doubles state champion in her junior year and made it to state semi-finals in singles play two years in a row.

Those successes led her to spend her senior season and final semester of high school training at Saddlebrook Academy, a tennis preparatory school in Wesley Chapel, Fla.

Not until her third season at Pitt did head coach George Dieffenbach tune her into the prospect of holding the all-time wins record.

“He said I had the ability,” she said of possibly achieving the aforementioned goal. “I was working to achieve this.”

Now that she has reached her goal, Davies hopes to keep pushing the record higher and higher. With only two season matches left against Duquesne and Rutgers and the possibility of a Big East Tournament run, Davies plans on winning as many matches as possible to end her years at Pitt.

After 10 years of serious focus on tennis, the 21-year-old will graduate this month from the College of Business Administration and work full-time with PNC Bank.

“Maybe I’ll keep playing, but I’ll be pretty busy,” she said.