Top seeds advance to PAL tennis finals

All matches begin at 2:30 p.m. Thursday at San Mateo High.

In singles play, top-seeded Ava Martin, a freshman from Menlo-Atherton, grabbed one of the finals slots with two more wins. In the quarterfinals, she dropped only one game in a 6-0, 6-1 victory. Victoria Gittoes, the No. 4 seed from Carlmont, was Martin’s semifinal opponent, with Martin, again, losing only one game to punch her ticket to the finals with a 6-1, 6-0 win.

Her opponent will be second-seeded Annika Lin. The senior from Carlmont was just as dominant. She routed her quarterfinal opponent 6-1, 6-0. In the semis, she took on No. 3 Charlie Smith, a sophomore from M-A who won her quarterfinal match 6-1, 6-2.

Smith put up a fight, but Lin ultimately prevailed 6-3, 6-2 to move into the singles championship match.

Martin and Lin faced each other once during the regular season, with Martin blitzing Lin, 6-1, 6-2. It will be the second straight championship appearance for Lin, who lost to Martin’s teammate, Allison Brown, 6-2, 6-2 in last year’s finals.

The third-place match will see Gittoes face off against Smith, who beat her 6-4, 6-3 earlier in the season.

On the doubles side, the top seed of Jessica Fu and Christina Wu of Aragon will face No. 2-seeded Sarah Marks and Lila Motamedi of M-A.

Fu and Wu lost only three games in a 6-3, 6-0 win in the quarters and followed that with an equally convincing win in the semis, 6-0, 6-2.

Mark and Motamedi might have been even more dominant dropping just four game over two matches — a 6-0, 6-0 quarterfinal win and a 6-4, 6-0 win in the semifinals.

The third-place match will feature No. 4 Maddie and Molly Wachhorst of Burlingame against No. 3 Grace Wang and Megan Stretch of San Mateo.

The Wachhorst sisters were pushed in their quarterfinal match, pulling out a 6-3, 7-5 win over Carlmont’s Saanika Joshi and Nikhila Raman before falling to Wu and Fu in the semis. Fu played in the third-place singles match in 2018.

Stretch and Wang had a much easier time in their quarterfinal match, notching a 6-1, 6-1 victory, but were knocked into the third-place match by Marks and Motamedi.