Correction/Clarification: (Published Oct. 12, 2001) In reporting Wednesday that Megan Hyland and Natalie Castagnero of Ellis School defeated Shannon Benic and Emily Goldblum of Winchester Thurston in the WPIAL Class AA consolation tennis match at North Park the previous day, we misspelled Benic's last name.
A number of theories were smacked over the fence and into North Park Lake yesterday afternoon at the WPIAL tennis girls' doubles finals.
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Look of a winner: Upper St. Clair's Shayna Miller, left, and Jessie Jones. (Franka Bruns, Post-Gazette) |
The theory that practice makes perfect took a hit.
The Upper St. Clair doubles team of Jessie Jones and Shayna Miller proved that isn't necessarily true. They won the WPIAL Class AAA title with a 6-2, 6-2, victory against Kim Whelan and Christie D'Achille of North Allegheny at the North Park courts. Jones and Miller practiced doubles together just two days before winning the Section 4-Class AAA title last week and just once this past weekend.
The theory about an athlete having to play tennis year round to have a chance at a WPIAL medal in the sport was drilled into the net by Rochester's doubles team of Trisha Camp and Jackie Anthony.
They defeated Mindy Hall and Kristina Cenkner of Mt. Pleasant, 7-5, 6-2, in the Class AA final.
Camp and Anthony also play basketball at Rochester and were on the softball team last spring. They didn't pick up their rackets for this season until Aug. 13, the first day of practice.
Jones and Miller dispelled another theory ... that high school seniors do not want anything to do with freshmen. Jones is a senior, Miller a freshman.
"We work well together because we have pretty much the same game," Miller said. "I wasn't worried about messing up or anything around her because I know her personality and she isn't like that. If we had just met each other maybe that would have been a problem, but we're friends and we were just having fun out there."
Jones and Miller are carbon copies in the way they play. Both have solid groundstrokes, fast and sure serves and don't mind attacking at the net.
"We both took lessons from Jan Irwin," Miller said. "We've never played each other in a match, but we have practiced against each other and our styles are similar."
Jones was the WPIAL runner-up in singles last year but didn't participate in singles at the WPIAL level this season because she had a college visitation to American University scheduled at the same time as the section tournament. The visit was pushed back a week because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but Jones still wouldn't have been able to play singles because her college visit would have conflicted with the WPIAL singles tournament.
"It's worked out for me," said Jones, who is the No. 1 singles player at Upper St. Clair. "I had an idea that Shayna and I would play doubles together and look at what happened. This is great."
Anthony and Camp had to win a three-set semifinal Monday against Megan Hyland and Natalie Castegnero of Ellis School to reach the final. They won that match, 7-6 (7-5), 1-6, 7-5.
"Nobody from Rochester had ever gotten that far before in tennis and earned a trip to the [PIAA] championships," Camp said. "We never thought we'd win WPIALs, we just wanted to go to states. After [Monday] we didn't have anything to lose and just went out there and played hard."
Camp, a senior, and Anthony, a junior, were up, 5-1, in the first set and allowed Hall and Cenkner to pull within 5-4 before closing it out.
"When I was a sophomore and she was a freshman, we were talking about playing doubles together," Camp said. "I said, 'Jackie, when I'm a senior and you're a junior we are going to go to states.' That's why we were all excited [Monday], because we were in the final and we knew we were going to go to states."
In the Class AAA consolation match, Ashley Michaux and Heather Webb of Penn-Trafford defeated Michelle Santoro and Amy Schmidt of Mt. Lebanon, 6-3, 5-7, 6-2, to earn a spot in the PIAA tournament. In the Class AA consolation match, Hyland and Castagnero downed Shannon Benic and Emily Goldblum of Winchester Thurston, 6-0, 6-2.
The top three teams from the WPIAL in each classification advance to the PIAA tournament.
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