Damion, Gaytan-Leach cruise to semifinals

SEAL BEACH — Corona del Mar High’s Jill Damion is a fan of doubles partner Cierra Gaytan-Leach.

She especially likes Gaytan-Leach’s powerful serve. Opponents on Thursday at the CIF Individual Tournament, held at the Seal Beach Tennis Center, would probably beg to differ.

Damion and Gaytan-Leach advanced to today’s doubles semifinals without dropping a set. They beat Krista Acosta and Bree Acosta of Lakewood, 6-0, 6-1, in the Round of 16 before topping Samantha Nadres and Stefanie Villajuan of Troy, 6-2, 7-5, in the quarterfinals.

Sea Kings teammates Lindsay Zotovich and Karen Ishii fell in the quarterfinals to top-seeded Roxanne Ellison and Sierra Ellison of Tesoro, 6-2, 6-2. The CdM sophomores got past Marie Zalameda and Beri Meyers of Beverly Hills in the Round of 16, with a 7-6 (7-2), 6-1 victory.

Gaytan-Leach and Damion will play Brynn Boren and Kristina Smith of Dana Hills in a semifinal today at 10:30 a.m., with the championship match to follow. The Ellison sisters play Akane Kitamura and Kiersten Steinhauer of Peninsula in the other semifinal.

“We want to win this,” Gaytan-Leach said. “It’s [Damion’s] senior year and we want to go out on top.”

Gaytan-Leach’s serve helped them get that chance, as they needed to hold serve because the match against Nadres and Villajuan suddenly got tight in the second set.

It was their first tense moment of the day, after cruising through the Round of 16 in under an hour.

“It makes me happy when she serves,” Damion said. “She hits the ball so hard that people can barely get it back, and then I can just go ‘dink’ [with a volley]. And I think my volleys have improved a lot in the last couple of months, just from playing a lot of doubles.”

The Sea Kings duo was up, 4-2, in the second set, but Nadres and Villajuan won three consecutive games to pull ahead. And, Gaytan-Leach was down 0-30 on her serve, with Troy just two points away from forcing a third set.

“At this point, it’s all good teams,” CdM Coach Brian Ricker said. “Between league finals, CIF qualifying and the first round here, they’ve won eight rounds to get here. That Troy team is improving.”

But Gaytan-Leach used some big serves to get out of the jam, holding in a deuce game to tie the score at 5-all. Her and Damion then broke the Troy team at love, and finished the match off in the next game with Gaytan-Leach’s emphatic volley.

“It was an easy first set, and we were kind of expecting to continue to win easily in the second set,” Damion said. “It was more of a lull. But neither of us wanted to play a third set, so we decided that we needed to just take it in gear and win.”

Damion added that she wasn’t necessarily worried about the competition today, saying that she didn’t think her and Gaytan-Leach would lose unless they played “terrible.”

“I might be a little bit overconfident, but I’m totally confident that Cierra and I can beat them handily,” Damion said. “If we lose, then I’ll feel like an idiot, but we’re not going to.”

Ricker agreed that he liked their chances against what he said was an aggressive Dana Hills team.

“I think they’re going to have a pretty good battle with Dana Hills,” he said. “They’re not that much better than everybody else, but I think they should win if they stay focused.”

Zotovich and Ishii had an exciting first match of the day, going into a first-set tiebreaker against their Beverly Hills opponents. They took a 4-2 lead in the tiebreaker on a perfectly placed lob by Ishii, then, at 5-2, won the set on consecutive volleys by Ishii.

The CdM duo took a 4-0 games lead in the second set and cruised from there, playing alert defense as the shots coming at them got harder and harder.

“Those girls hit really hard at the baseline, so we didn’t want to take the chance of being out-rallied every single point,” Ishii said. “We had to play our own game.”

In the quarterfinal, Zotovich and Ishii lost the first set against Tesoro’s Ellison sisters, 6-1, before going up, 3-2, in the second set.

But they faltered from there, losing four games in a row to be eliminated.

“With those two getting all the way to the quarterfinals and losing to the No. 1 seed, you’ve got to be happy with that,” Ricker said of the tandem that had only teamed up for one set during the regular season. “They’re sophomores, and they have two more great years in front of them. They’ve got all the skills to be really successful in doubles; I’m excited for their future.”

Zotovich said that she was also happy with the postseason run.

“We were disappointed that they came back [in the second set],” Zotovich said. “They were good players, but we got really far. We’re really excited to get this far.”

CIF Individual Tournament

Doubles

Quarterfinals -- Damion/Gaytan-Leach (CdM) def. Nadres-Villajuan (Troy), 6-2, 7-5; Zotovich-Ishii (CdM) lost to Ellison-Ellison (Tesoro), 6-1, 6-3.

Round of 16 -- Damion-Gaytan-Leach (CdM) def. Acosta-Acosta (Lakewood), 6-0, 6-1; Zotovich-Ishii (CdM) def. Zalameda-Meyers (Beverly Hills), 7-6 (7-2), 6-1.