Alyssa Tobita and Ashley Ishimura, those Sea Warriors destroyers, finished off their college upset trifecta Friday to win the Oahu Club Women’s Night Doubles championship.
The junior tennis players from Mililani beat Hawaii Pacific’s Celina Cassandra Goetti and Lea Kruse-Uttermann 6-3, 2-6, 7-6 (2) in a compelling two-hour tennis final.
Goetti, a junior from Australia, and Kruse-Uttermann, a sophomore from Germany, were seeded second. Tobita and Ishimura took out the top-seeded team in the first round — also from HPU — and a third Sea Warriors team in the second round.
They didn’t even drop a set until Goetti and Kruse-Utterman gamely rallied to take the first five games of the second and hold on.
Tobita, a Mililani High School junior who has won the past two state high school singles championships, and Ishimura, who won a state doubles title five months ago as a Punahou freshman, were down 1-4 in the third set.
"They volleyed real well and hit a lot of down-the-line shots," Ishimura said. "I wasn’t expecting those. As the match went on, we got a little more used to it."
At that point the girls who have known each other half their short lives, and played doubles together since they were 10, regained their magic and mojo over HPU.
"We knew we had nothing to lose already," said Tobita, "so we could go down without a fight or go all out. We just played like we had nothing to lose."
They won four straight games to go up 5-4. The Sea Warriors, so dominant for so long with Kruse-Utterman’s spins and volleys and Goetti’s ground strokes, battled back again.
They broke Ishimura’s serve to tie it at 5 and went back ahead when Kruse-Utterman held her serve. Tobita held hers as well to force the tiebreaker and Goetti launched her best serve of the night to go up 1-0.
The kids dominated from that point on, as HPU got a little wild — as it had early — and Tobita and Ishimura refused to lose, or miss.
Three unforced HPU errors, the last of the tiny Tobita’s huge poaches and a jaw-dropping forehand from Ishimura gave the junior players a 5-1 advantage. Tobita drilled a winner down the line to get to match point.
Kruse-Utterman ended the streak with an overhead, but Ishimura ended the match with a backhand cross-court.
"I think in the tiebreaker we just weren’t going for shots that weren’t very smart," Tobita said. "We were really consistent and the shots we hit were high percentage."
Tobita is ranked 83rd nationally in the Class of 2014 by tennisrecruiting.net. She is seeded third in the USTA Junior Regional 18-under championship, which starts today at Patsy T. Mink CORP Tennis Complex. Ishimura is also in the singles draw and they are playing doubles together again.
That event mean more in terms of ratings and interest from colleges, but their Sea Warriors sweep this week will stay with them.
"It means a lot," Tobita said. "We thought this match …
"… was a good opportunity to see where we were," Ishimura added.
"It got us a lot more experience to where we want to be, like in college," Tobita picked up.
"But again, we had nothing to lose. We didn’t have all the pressure."