A Sweet Spot for Success

For all his recent travels, amid the inconsistencies of life as an American immigrant, Adriano Biasella has found a welcoming, one-weekend-a-year home in the hills of Southern California.

He has come to past Ojai Valley tennis tournaments with lofty expectations, carried various affiliations and maintained a dominant style.

He coasted through the men’s community college and open divisions the last two years, each time earning an individual title. With a victory in today’s Pacific 10 men’s championship, Biasella would complete the most demanding and rewarding leg of his Ojai triple crown.

The stage is set for the new USC star, who faces top-seeded Sam Warburg of Stanford at 11 a.m. in the pair’s third match this month.

Biasella defeated Warburg, 6-1, 6-4, on April 2. Warburg defeated Biasella, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, at No. 1 singles in the Pac-10 regular-season finale on April 17. That second match forced the Trojans to share the conference title with UCLA and gave Warburg confidence coming into today’s rematch.

“If I can be aggressive, it’s in my court,” said Warburg, who advanced past the first day of Ojai for the first time this year. “He’ll wait for me to miss.”

Biasella, ranked 31st in the latest Intercollegiate Tennis Assn. rankings, is hoping to engage in a baseline free-for-all. That method plays to his strengths: consistent ground strokes and extensive court coverage.

Those were evident in Saturday’s 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (2) victory over Washington’s Alex Vlaski, the nation’s sixth-ranked player.

“His cross-court backhand was huge,” USC Coach Peter Smith said. “I’d never seen him do it this well.”

Patience has been a staple of Biasella’s tennis game. Off the court, it’s been a work in progress since moving to America.

The dream of playing tennis at a top university motivated Biasella, then 17 years old, to leave his native Rome in January 2001.

Biasella initially was hampered by a lack of direction.

“I had to start somewhere, but I was clueless,” Biasella said. “When I came over, I didn’t know the difference between the NCAA and a junior college.”

One of his first American contacts, the college tennis coach at Louisville, said attending a junior college would virtually guarantee him a future spot on the Cardinals’ roster.

So Biasella enrolled at Vincennes University in Indiana. The transition from metropolitan Italy to the rural Midwest didn’t go smoothly.

“It was horrible,” Biasella said. “It was cold and the team never played indoors.”

After one semester he decided to transfer to College of the Desert in Palm Desert because of the school’s top-notch tennis team and its proximity to major universities in Southern California. Biasella didn’t lose a match in his season at College of the Desert, which included regional exposure at his first Ojai tournament trip.

In the spring of 2002, Biasella made his recruiting rounds in Southern California, where he met Smith, who was coaching men’s tennis at Pepperdine. Biasella immediately hit it off with Smith but didn’t think Pepperdine was the right fit.

When Smith replaced USC coach Dick Leach in June 2002, his decision to move to Los Angeles became easy.

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Top-seeded Travis Rettenmaier hadn’t lost more than three games in a set coming into Saturday’s men’s open semifinals.

He started the third set against Fresno’s Bryan Juinio having already given up 12 games.

“I was struggling at first,” said Rettenmaier, who played at UCLA from 2000 to ’01 and now resides in Venice. “I was waiting for my best stuff to come.”

Rettenmaier managed to grind out a 7-6, 4-6, 6-3 win over Juinio to advance to the finals, where he’ll meet second-seeded Michael Joyce at 12:30 p.m.

In the women’s open division, second-seeded Maureen Diaz of Glendale faces top-seeded Martina Nejedly of Palm Springs in the finals at 9:30 a.m.

Stanford’s Alice Barnes plays in the women’s Pac-10 finals against California’s Raquel Kops-Jones at 9:30 a.m.

Barnes and Erin Burdette face Kops-Jones and Jieun Jacobs in the women’s Pac-10 finals at 12:30 p.m.

Stanford’s men’s doubles team of James Pade and K.C. Corkery face UCLA’s Philipp Gruendler and Luben Pampoulov at 2 p.m. in the finals.