Westlake Continues Drive for Championship Trophy

The Westlake High boys’ tennis team hit the road Thursday, traveling a couple of hours south on Interstate 5.

Traffic was surprisingly light, the drive was smooth.

But that was all that went easily as the Warriors won a Southern Section Division II semifinal over Mission Viejo in a match that was much closer than its 13-5 score suggests.

“We knew it was going to be a grind,” top singles player Darren Joe said. “I think we had a lot of heart today.”

It was one of the few times the top-seeded Warriors (20-0) had been truly challenged all season. They advanced to the championship against Beverly Hills on Wednesday.

Westlake turned the momentum against Mission Viejo with three tight, come-from-behind victories, one of which involved Joe.

With the team score tied at 3-3, the Princeton-bound senior was in jeopardy of losing for the first time all season, down two set points to Mission Viejo’s Eric Bachelor.

It was a classic matchup of Joe’s accuracy versus the power of the taller, heavier Bachelor.

Joe needed a stretching overhead and a well-placed backhand to stay alive at 4-5. Then he hit a series of tough passing shots to close out the set at 7-5 and push his record to 42-0.

“I don’t think there was a big difference [between us],” Bachelor said. “It was just the shots he put together at the right time.”

Westlake Coach Grant Calkins beamed: “You can push [Joe] to the edge of the cliff, but he’s really hard to push over.”

Meanwhile, on an adjacent court, Westlake’s No. 2 singles player, sophomore Alex Yaftali, was fighting back from 5-2 down to beat Jon Akturk, 7-5.

And the No. 2 doubles team of Albert Kim and Brad Wong, which had not won all day, was coming back from a similar deficit to win by tiebreaker, 7-6 (7-3), against Kareem Lorseydi and Derek Shoji.

Those three sets, ending within minutes of each other, transformed a dead-even match into a Westlake victory.

“Those three killed us,” Mission Viejo Coach Bill Smith said. “At crucial times, they played well and we didn’t. We didn’t close things out when we were ahead.”

The victory was especially sweet for Kim and Wong because Westlake’s doubles teams had been shut out in their Division III championship loss to Harvard-Westlake last year.

“We lost it last year,” Wong said. “So we talked about that, about the doubles having to pull through.”

Now the Warriors--who moved up a division because of a change in the school’s enrollment--have another chance to get their hands on a championship trophy.

But before they could truly ponder that opportunity, or appreciate their semifinal triumph, the players faced a long drive home.

“I’m just glad to get out of here,” Joe said. “I want to go home, hit the jacuzzi, get some sleep.”