Spencer Closes Strong to Reach Boys Final; Girls Top Seed Burdette Tries Again for Championship

Spencer Closes Strong to Reach Boys Final; Girls Top Seed Burdette Tries Again for Championship--
©Colette Lewis 2005--
Philadelphia PA--

Floridians Clint Bowles and Wil Spencer stood at two matches apiece in their rivalry, having split two hard court and two clay court meetings. Unsurprisingly, their semifinal match Friday at the US Grass Court Championship at the Philadelphia Cricket Club was a two and a half hour epic, with Spencer saving three match points en route to a 6-7(6), 6-1, 7-5 victory.


Neither Spencer, 15, or Bowles, 16, had lost a set in the tournament, so it was fitting that the first set ended with a tiebreaker. Spencer ran out to a 4-0 lead, but Bowles fought back, converting his second set point.

In set two, Spencer, seeded sixth, immediately seized the advantage, galloping to a 4-0 lead before Bowles finally held, then finished the set with a flourish by breaking Bowles to get even.

In the third set, the roller coaster of a match saw Bowles peaking early, up two breaks and 3-0 before Spencer started chipping away at the lead, getting one break back, but still down 5-4 when Bowles stepped to the line to serve for a place in the finals. Spencer earned a 15-40 lead in the game, and at 30-40 thought he had evened the set when he called a ball on the baseline out, but was overruled by the chair umpire. Bowles then garnered the ad, and with it match points, three times, but each time Spencer denied him, and the psychological edge Spencer gained there effectively ended the match, as he held at love and broke Bowles at love in the final game.

"At the end, I decided to be agressive, not defensive," said Spencer, "and it paid off."

Asked about the overrule, and his ability to shrug off the effects of it, Spencer said, "I wanted to win so bad, I just let it go. I was focusing so hard on winning that I didn't let it bother me."

Spencer's opponent in the final on Saturday is fifth seed Rupesh Roy of India, who defeated Cory Parr 6-3, 7-6 (4). Roy, 16, was unable to serve out the match at 5-4, but prevailed in the tiebreaker when the 17-year-old New Yorker lost both his serves at 3-4.

Roy and Bradley Cox, the third seeded team, took the doubles championship over the unseeded team of Bowles and Michael Sroczynski 6-7(8), 7-5, 6-2. Until five all in the second set, there were no service breaks, but eventually Cox and Roy coaxed one from a weary Bowles, squaring the match. When they broke Sroczynski in the first game of the third set, then held, Cox and Roy established an edge that they had no trouble maintaining as they did not drop serve in the entire match.

The semifinal matches in girls singles were less dramatic, as last year's Grass Court finalist and top seed Lindsay Burdette, 17, took out unseeded thirteen-year-old Julia Boserup 6-3, 6-2 and third seed Madison Brengle ended the impressive run of Pennsylvanian qualifier Michaela Kissell 6-2, 6-1. Brengle, 15, lost the first two games of the match, then ran off 11 straight games before Kissell got on the board.

In the girls doubles final, Texans Sanaz Marand and Ashley Weinhold lived up to the top seeds, as they defeated the second seeded team of Jelena Durisic and Stefanie Nunic 6-3, 6-4. Marand and Weinhold breezed through the draw without losing a set.