Women’s Intercollegiate Invitational Tennis : It’s USC’s Harges vs. Stanford’s Fendick

The way Stephanie Harges of USC talked about the match, one would have thought she was lucky to win her semifinal in the Women’s Intercollegiate Invitational Saturday:

It could have gone either way. . . . The match was closer than the score indicated. . . . It was really tough.

You get the idea. Harges was indulging in a form of Tennis Speak, designed to make her friend and teammate, Maeve Quinlan, feel better.

Well, it wasn’t that close.

Harges defeated Quinlan, 6-0, 6-2, at the Riviera Tennis Club in Pacific Palisades. In the final, she’ll meet Stanford’s Patty Fendick, who defeated Jennifer Santrock of SMU, 6-4, 6-1, in the other semifinal.

Quinlan, though, gave a more accurate assessment of the match.

“A disaster,” she told a friend.

Harges won the first seven games before Quinlan managed to hold serve. In the first set, several games were close, with four of them going to 3-3. But in college tennis there is no-ad scoring, which worked to Harges’ advantage.

“It was possible I wanted it too much,” Quinlan said. “Both of us wanted it, but I felt a little tight and pressed too much. I felt I had to do something special to win the point, going for the winner too soon.”

In contrast, Santrock showed no signs of nervousness early in her match against Fendick, the top-seeded player and reigning NCAA champion. Santrock, seeded No. 4, had a 4-1 first-set lead before Fendick came back to win the next eight games.

They had never played against each other, and the only previous time Fendick saw her play was Friday when Santrock was pushed to three sets by qualifier Edna Olivarez of Cal State Los Angeles.

“After (watching) that match, I wasn’t very impressed,” Fendick said. “She played 190% better today. She played really well.”

However, as well as Santrock did play, it only resulted in Fendick losing five games. That’s how many games Harges took off Fendick in their second-round match at the National Collegiate tournament in Cathedral City earlier this month.

While organizers of the Intercollegiate Invitational had expected a Stanford-USC final, they didn’t expect a Fendick-Harges rematch.

They were thinking more along the lines of a Caroline Kuhlman-Fendick final, Part 10.

Kuhlman lost to Fendick in the NCAA quarterfinals last year and pushed the Stanford player to three sets in the semifinals at Cathedral City. Right before the start of the invitational, Kuhlman was forced to withdraw because of an old knee injury.

“Well, we’ll probably be playing about 18 more times this year,” Fendick said, joking. “I am disappointed that she’s not here. What she has is really tough to cope with . . . but I think she’ll bounce right back.”