No. 1 Newport Harbor Dominates Corona del Mar

The Newport Harbor girls’ tennis team didn’t just beat Corona del Mar on Wednesday. The top-ranked Sailors beat up the sixth-ranked Sea Kings at Newport Harbor High.

They won the nonleague match, 15-3, and before the day was over, they retired all of Corona del Mar’s singles players.

Newport Harbor’s No. 1 singles player, Natalie Braverman, had a big hand in the Sailors’ easy victory but had a hard time believing the final score.

“I was expecting to win,” Braverman said. “But I’m not sure we were expecting to win by this much.”

And she didn’t expect Corona del Mar’s top three players--Nadia Vaughan, Anne Yelsey and Kim Singer--to default the final round of singles. Although by that time, Newport Harbor led, 11-1, and had clinched the match.

Vaughan, who blew a 5-1 first-round lead and lost to Braverman, 7-6 (7-2), decided to rest her ailing elbow rather than face Chelsea Godbey in the third round. Yelsey, who earned the Sea Kings’ only singles victory with a 6-1 win over Godbey, trailed Braverman, 3-0, when she retired with a back injury. Singer, nursing a wrist injury, defaulted her match to Audra Adams.

Vaughan, who had missed the previous two matches with elbow tendinitis, said her team came in thinking upset.

“We were so fired up,” she said. “We knew it would be tougher than other years because we had injuries and some confidence problems. But we thought we could win.”

But those confidence problems quickly resurfaced when Vaughan lost to Braverman, giving Newport Harbor (11-1) a 6-0 first-round lead. In the first six games against Braverman, Vaughan was nearly perfect. But her serve and ground strokes let her down in the clutch.

“It was a mind thing,” said Vaughan, who split two sets with Braverman last year. “And once it became a mind thing, my game went to dirt.”

Braverman, who stayed undefeated on the season, has had a habit of falling behind early in her sets and then rallying for victories.

“There’s so little margin for error in one set,” Braverman said. “I think I was going for too much. I was expecting to go out there and play a perfect set. And that just doesn’t happen.”

Newport Harbor’s No. 1 doubles team of Kristen Case and Jenny Meyer was nearly perfect, winning 6-1, 6-1, 6-0. The teams of Amanda Collopy-Megan Hawkins and Allison Schneider-Sarah Barker took two of three sets. Corona del Mar dropped to 7-5.