OCC Women's Tennis Stuns Roadrunners in Dual Team Regional Semifinals
The Orange Coast College women's tennis team is picking the right time to play its best tennis of the season. Led by a solid start in doubles and strong depth in singles, the Pirates upset top-seeded College of the Desert, 5-4, in the Southern California Dual playoff semifinals on Tuesday.
PALM DESERT -- The Orange Coast College women's tennis team is picking the right time to play its best tennis of the season. Led by a solid start in doubles and strong depth in singles, the Pirates upset top-seeded College of the Desert, 5-4, in the Southern California Dual playoff semifinals on Tuesday.
The win for the fourth-seeded Pirates (14-2) sets up an Orange Empire Conference showdown with second-seed Fullerton College (18-2) on Saturday at FC, beginning at 2 p.m. The Hornets advanced to Satuday's final with a 5-3 win over seventh-seeded Riverside on Tuesday.
The matchup started with doubles and the Pirates knocked the previously-undefeated Roadrunners (13-1) back on their heels by winning 2-of-3 matches.
Haley Dickson and Nikki Thornburg edged out the Roadrunners' top pair of Leticia Dos Santos and Laura Arruda, 8-6. Mai Hashimoto and Nadine Baquiran gave Coast a 2-0 lead by topping Leticia Vierra and Barbara Haikel, 8-5.
Thornburg, the Pirates' captain, showed her leadership in singles with an impressive 6-4, 6-0 win over Arruda. Hashimoto followed up her doubles win with a hard-fought 7-5, 6-4 win over Karina Braz.
At No. 6 singles, Anh Pham went back and forth with COD's Violeta Mollovs and in the end, it was Pham who hung on for the 7-5, 7-5 win, sending the Pirates into the regional finals.
This will be the third matchup between the Pirates and Hornets, with Fullerton winning the first two matches -- 5-4 at OCC on on Feb. 27 and 7-2 at FC on April 3. In that 7-2 loss, Coast pushed the Hornets to the edge, but came up short on three different three-set scores.