Senior Day is not what it used to be. In the transfer portal era, players rarely stay in the same place their whole career. So when you have a four-year player that is a key cog in your program, they are certainly worth celebrating.
For No. 14 NC State women’s tennis, that key cog is senior Anna Zyryanova — a gutsy, hard-hitting player who has been at the top of the Wolfpack lineup for the past three years.
She is the lone remaining player from NC State’s run to the national championship match in 2023, where the Pack fell to UNC-Chapel Hill. As a freshman that year, the Moscow, Russia native didn’t get many opportunities to play. But over the next four years, she has become a consistent force.
“Rather than just randomizing it every single year, and ‘let’s see what we get,’ we know what we’re gonna get with her,” head coach Simon Earnshaw said. “We know she can bring a level of experience and knowledge within our program.”
Playing a majority of her matches on Court 3 this season, No. 53-ranked Zyryanova is 16-4 with four ranked wins, and is currently riding an eight-match win streak. Her best win by the numbers came at No. 9 Pepperdine in mid-March as she topped No. 20 Anastasiia Grechkina 6-4, 7-5. She also picked up a win over No. 40 Rose Marie Nijkamp of Oklahoma State at ITA Indoors.
In her whole career, having played at the No. 1 and No. 2 spot for over 30 matches, she has faced formidable foes and picked up some good wins. Arguably her best win was against No. 14 Connie Ma of Stanford in mid-April of 2025, as Zyryanova handed Ma her only loss of the duel season. Zyryanova also took down Tar Heel No. 23 Theadora Rabman earlier that season.
“She’s the only one we have that knows how it is to go the whole way,” Earnshaw said. “She did start school in January [2023], so she had to be a fast learner, which really pushed you behind the eight ball, as particularly with the team that we had. So she didn’t really get her opportunities. But that summer, she immediately had success in some pro events, so we knew we knew we had something there that was going to be very important for her as move forward in her sophomore year.”
Zyryanova’s path reminds Earnshaw of a time in college athletics where continuity was the norm.
“It’s become so endemic in our sport, with short-termism and all this multiple transfers and dropping and changing. When we were in the early days of the program, we had three freshmen that came in my 2nd year. By their senior year, we had moved from not being in the tournament, to being right on the cusp of the top 10. We made the round of 16 for the first time with that group. And then, we had another freshman class of four-year players, and we had more four year players.”
For Earnshaw, the turning point was 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when the NCAA lost the handle on everything.
“And it’s almost like the waterfall there was COVID,” Earnshaw said. “Came back from COVID and the rules have just gotten nuts. And it’s difficult these days when people don’t necessarily get what they want, they have the option to just go see if they can find it somewhere else, rather than to persist. We didn’t have any seniors last year. It was a little bit unusual like that. And I mean, [Zyryanova is] an example, if you have some continuity, not even, for the individual, but it helps everybody around them stay a little more orderly.”
By the end of the conversation about Zyryanova, Earnshaw was just reminiscing about all of the great wins she’s had over the years — and there have been plenty.
“In both our wins against UNC, she saved matched points,” Earnshaw said. “One at indoors, where she was down 6-4 in the third set tie-break … and then on that court over there [gesturing Court 3], she was down two match points in the second set against Reilly Tran. Turned that one around. So, you knew very soon at the conclusion of that season, even though she didn’t have a tremendous amount of opportunities that first year, she was gonna be a major factor with the program moving forward.”
From then on, she has had a tremendous impact on the program. Stepping up in the absence of freshman Michaela Laki who tore her ACL last year, sliding up to the first spot on the roster, Zyryanova led the Pack to the Sweet 16. This year, she has been an integral part of the Pack’s success.
She will be missed, but the season isn’t over yet. Zyryanova looks to lead the Pack through the postseason in her final campaign, and with the ceiling of this Wolfpack women’s tennis team, maybe she will close her career in a similar place where she started: at the very top of the sport.
