Syracuse senior Gabriela Knutson was named an All-American by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association on Thursday evening. It’s the second consecutive year she’s received that honor. In her final campaign at SU, Knutson played all of her matches at first singles and doubles while compiling 16-10 and 14-11 records, respectively. She finished No. 20 in the final Oracle/ITA singles rankings released yesterday.

Knutson’s final collegiate match was a straight-set loss to then-No. 53 Stacey Fung in the first round of the NCAA singles championships. It was the second-straight season that Knutson made the singles tournament — she advanced to the round of 16 last season before losing to Pepperdine’s Mayar Sherif.

As a pair, Miranda Ramirez and Knutson earned All-American honors in 2018 after rising to No. 8 in the doubles rankings. Knutson was also a singles All-American that season, the first SU player to do so since Erica O’Neill in 1995.

A new training approach heading into last spring allowed Knutson to leap into the top-tier of women’s tennis. She had always taken the opponent’s “biggest punch,” at the top slot in the Orange lineup, but turned competitive matches into upsets.

Looking back on spring 2018, Knutson said she knew it would be her best semester: It started with an “easier academic semester” that meshed favorably with tennis practices, continued with post-practice workouts and ended in a season where Knutson climbed to No. 4 in the singles rankings. This year, she peaked at No. 13 and defeated UNC’s then-No. 5 Makenna Jones and Georgia Tech’s then-No. 8 Kenya Jones in three sets.

Knutson will play tennis next year on a postgraduate international scholarship at Durham University in the United Kingdom. She finished her SU career with 179 career wins — second all-time in program history and 23 behind Jana Strnadova’s 202.