San Clemente, CA — JSerra Frosh Soph exited at Pico and waded into a tidal wave this afternoon. Despite the lopsided score, there were a few close sets, and great efforts all the way around. With a few girls missing and playing an all doubles format on 7 courts, almost every JSerra player got to play 3 full sets of tennis! Thank you Chloe Gallaher for stepping up from line 7 to fill in at line #2 in the 3rd round for an exiting team member. First and foremost, MVP honors go to our only set winners today, the “Amtrack girls” - Molly Harrington and Mary Murphy. They won a tough opening set against the legit #2 Triton team. Well played. Kudos to Faith Blower and Brooke Bowman who forced a tie-breaker in an exciting first round set on court #1 vs SC’s top team; followed by a close 4-6 loss to the #2 team. Honorable mention to 3 other teams who played tough 4-6 sets this afternoon: Siena Livak with Kendall Beuerlein, Ava Smith with Elianna Castro, and Abby Godber with Julianna Rough. All these sets were tied at 4-4 and the Lady Lions were in it to win it. After seeing some very fast serves during warm-up, we reviewed our “2 back on 1st serves” defensive strategy, which was implemented across all courts for the whole afternoon. This strategy, used by the world famous Bryan brothers, works well vs fast servers and is more forgiving when returns go towards server’s net partner. Great job ladies working on this style and trying to block back those monster serves coming at you. We play them again on Oct 30th, last match of the season - boo! Next up: tomorrow morning, Saturday, Sept. 11th at JSerra vs Edison. 12:30 warm up, 1pm match time.