Big win pushes Nuss-Kloth into Beach Pro Tour Finals playoffs

Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth didn’t have calculators on hand during their final match of pool play during the Beach Pro Tour Finals. They weren’t sure if their 21-15, 21-15 victory over Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon of the Netherlands was enough to win their tiebreak over the Dutch and, potentially, over Brazil’s Taina Silva and Victoria Lopes, who will finish pool play on Friday morning in Doha.

Both Kloth and Nuss and Stam and Schoon closed pool play with two wins and two losses. While Stam and Schoon had won a set over Australia’s Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho, and Nuss and Kloth were swept earlier in the day (22-20, 21-17) the tiebreak is decided purely on point differential. By the slimmest of margins, then, did Nuss and Kloth squeak out of pool play of the final tournament of the season, edging the Dutch by a differential margin of .04 Whether they advance from pool as the second or third seed will be determined by Friday’s matchup between the Australians and Brazil, though for all intents and purposes it doesn’t matter much; either way, they will begin Friday afternoon’s playoffs in the quarterfinals.

“We really gotta stop doing this to ourselves,” Nuss said afterwards, laughing. “But seriously it was nice to get back to playing the way we know how we can play. To be honest, the first two matches were just bad. And just mentally we were not there but it’s nice to know that still in our young career we can bounce back quickly.”

It had been a rough start to the tournament, not just for Nuss and Kloth but for the USA as a whole. Coming into their final round of pool, the three American teams in attendance were winless, aside from a forfeit Nuss and Kloth were gifted from a medical withdrawal from Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli of Switzerland. Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, with a morning loss to Brazilians Ana Patricia and Duda (21-13, 21-19) had dropped to 0-3. Andy Benesh and Miles Partain were 0-2 and, in the match following Nuss and Kloth’s…