Streak for Damion, Walters stifled

Chris Yemma

After cruising through matches all the way to the semifinals of the

CIF Southern Section individual girls tennis championships, Corona

del Mar High’s doubles team of Jill Damion and Allie Walters ran into

a hitch Friday.

The top-seeded CdM duo lost to third-seeded Amber Harper and Jen

Kaswick of Harvard-Westlake, 4-6, 6-2, 4-6, at SeaCliff Country Club

in Huntington Beach, ending Damion and Walters’ win streak of nine

consecutive matches dating back to the Pacific Coast League finals

when they first teamed together.

The Sea Kings’ team won the second set Friday convincingly and had

a chance to go up three-games-to-none in the third set after winning

the first two, but missed the opportunity.

“They should have won that match,” CdM Coach Brian Ricker said.

“We missed the opportunity in the third set.”

Despite the close match, Ricker attributed a portion of

Harvard-Westlake’s win to the simple fact that Harper and Kaswick

have been playing together all season, whereas Damion and Walters

only recently teamed up.

“It was a combination of [Harper and Kaswick] are used to playing

with each other, but also they just play a lot more doubles,” Ricker

said.

Damion and Walters easily won in the round of 16 and the

quarterfinals Thursday to advance to the semis Friday. They first

swept Troy’s Jennifer Chow and Erica Liao, 6-0, 6-2, and then swept

Beverly Hills’ Tessa Tran and Anna Litovsky in the quarterfinals.

But as Ricker expected after Thursday’s matches, the semifinals

proved to be a bit trickier for the CdM girls.

“We started missing too much and they started getting more balls

in,” Damion said. “They just beat us and we gave it away.”

Both Damion and Walters agreed that it wasn’t the lack of

experience playing together that caused the loss. It was just errors

on their parts, they said.

Harvard-Westlake’s Harper said the Sea Kings’ duo was the toughest

they’d faced in the tournament thus far.

“These two were a lot more aggressive,” Harper said. “They were

really consistent and it forced us to play our best -- we couldn’t

give up anything against them.”

Damion, a sophomore, and Walters, a freshman, helped lead the Sea

Kings to a Pacific Coast League title and a semifinal appearance in

the CIF Southern Section Division I playoffs, where they lost to

eventual champion Calabasas. Both players are expected to anchor a

strong CdM team next season.