No. 10 NC State women’s tennis head coach Simon Earnshaw is fielding his youngest team in years and it’s one of the best teams in the nation. The Wolfpack is youthful — talented but young.

That youth showed in the Pack’s rivalry weekend, where it suffered a pair of 4-3 losses to No. 7 Duke on Friday and No. 4 UNC-Chapel Hill on Sunday. The red-and-white took each of its rivals to the wire, to the very last court, but couldn’t emerge with a win either time.

Despite the losses, Earnshaw was proud of his team’s effort in exhausting, slugfest matches.

“It’s been a rough weekend for us, but I don’t think it’s been a negative weekend,” Earnshaw said. “We’re obviously very young, and I’m very encouraged that we’re able to come into these situations and play at this level. Because, I don’t think — if we went back to January — we would have thought that we would be able to stand up to this level of rigor at this juncture, with such a young team.”

At No. 7 Duke, 4-3 loss

The Pack’s duel in Durham began with a close, 4-3 loss to the Blue Devils. After a rare loss in the doubles round, the Pack attempted to overcome the early deficit. Instead, it fell just short in its wire-to-wire match with the Blue Devils.

While the fearsome No. 2 pair of sophomores Gabriella Broadfoot and Maddy Zampardo won their bout with the No. 12 ranked pair 6-4, the Wolfpack’s pairs on Courts 2 and 3 couldn’t push a potential doubles round win over the finish line. Sophomore Kristina Paskauskas and freshman Michaela Laki first fell 6-1 on Court 3 while the pair of sophomore Jasmine Conway and junior Anna Zyryanova lost 7-5 on Court 2, giving Duke a 1-0 lead.

The Blue Devils doubled their lead with an early, ranked win on Court 3 in the singles round over No. 99 Zampardo in the only two-set match of the day. In a 2-0 hole, NC State began battling back, starting with a win on Court 1 from the Pack’s standout freshman No. 27 Michaela Laki.

In a battle against Duke’s No. 12 Irina Balus, Laki won the final two sets of her three-set match, losing just two games in those sets to take down Balus. Broadfoot then came through for NC State on Court 4, taking the final two sets of her three-setter with minimal losses in a 2-6, 6-1, 6-3 win over Duke’s No. 41 Eleana Yu.

NC State won its third match in a row with a win from Zyryanova on Court 2. The junior beat Duke’s Liv Hovde 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 to put her team in clinch position at 3-2. However, Duke stormed back, winning the remaining two matches to claim the overall victory over the red-and-white.

The Blue Devils first downed Paskauskas on Court 5 in three sets, putting the fate of the match on the shoulders of No. 121 freshman Mia Slama. Slama has clinched two top-10 wins this season already in the same situation. However, against Duke, Slama couldn’t pull off the same trick a third time. The freshman fell 6-4 in the match’s deciding set, leaving the Pack with a 4-3 loss in the Bull City.

Like the successes of Slama and the rest of NC State’s young lineup, they naturally still have a lot to learn, especially when competing against the best teams in the country such as Duke and UNC.

“We’re playing catch up all the time, and I think we’ll catch up,” Earnshaw said. “And I think you can see we’re catching fast right now. It’s just, how can we encourage that and take care of details on a daily basis.”

At No. 4 UNC, 4-3 loss

With countless storied matchups in the past few seasons, NC State and UNC added to their dramatic history with another 4-3 result. While the Wolfpack took the doubles point, UNC edged the Pack out in singles, taking four of six courts to take the match 4-3.

While Slama was last on against Duke, Broadfoot was the last one remaining for NC State against Carolina. A fiery, energetic and tense match was spurred on by a passionate crowd in Chapel Hill, one that ultimately pushed No. 48 Tatum Evans over Broadfoot in three sets.

Broadfoot, like the rest of her team, battled as hard as she could against the Tar Heels, but ultimately just failed to deliver the victory.

“We’re fighting our asses off and we’re fighting our asses off in the most difficult situations and locations that there is to play in college tennis with a group of players that has a combined two years of experience of college tennis — it’s by far the youngest team — there’s no team that’s as young as us,” Earnshaw said.

Early on in the match, Broadfoot played a big part in earning her team the doubles point with a now-routine win. Even against one of the best doubles teams in the country, Broadfoot and Zampardo beat the combo of Reese Brantmeier and Susanna Maltby 6-3.

Zyryanova and Conway clinched the point with a 6-2 win over UNC’s Carson Tanguilig and Theadora Rabman and moved their team into singles with a 1-0 lead.

However, UNC quickly took hold of singles, winning three straight matches in succession after hours of battling. The Heels set down Paskauskas in two gritty sets while Slama fell on Court 6 in three.

Laki, who was pitted against UNC standout No. 9 Brantmeier, was stuck in a star-studded matchup on Court 1. The two teams’ best players fought through three sets, with Brantmeier eventually beating the freshman even after Laki won the first set.

Down 3-1, NC State battled back with eyes on a heroic comeback victory. Zampardo faced No. 43 Tanguilig on Court 3 and beat her Carolina rival in three sets, 6-4, 2-6, 6-4. With NC State needing two more wins and UNC needing just one, Zyryanova moved the Pack ever closer with a 3-6, 7-6, 6-1 win on Court 2 over No. 15 Rabman.

NC State was headed towards a comeback but was sentenced to another close 4-3 loss with Evans’ close win over Broadfoot on Court 4.

The Wolfpack is only set to play one more opponent as formidable as UNC or Duke until the postseason in Stanford. It’ll likely meet one or even both teams in the ACC Tournament or NCAA Championships.

In order to beat those high-caliber teams, NC State has to execute and close out matches, according to Earnshaw. The head coach said that while talented, the team’s inexperience has kept NC State from garnering a series of ranked wins — aside from “signature” wins over Michigan and Virginia.

“The thing that we’re missing this year — and why our ranking is what it is right now — is we just don’t have a collection of wins,” Earnshaw said. “We’ve got two very, very signature wins. In some ways, when the conference changed their scheduling, we’ve not got the matches in us. In some ways, that was a positive as well, because I don’t know if we could have done this week in, week out. It’d be too rugged because we’re younger. As we get older, we can handle that.”

NC State will face Clemson on Friday as it returns to Raleigh. Play against the Tigers is set to begin at 3 p.m.