It was a matchup so nice, they ran it twice.
In one of the matches that everyone at the Tualatin Hills Tennis Center had their eyes on during the OSAA Class 6A state championships on Saturday afternoon, Westview’s Neena Feldman and Clackamas’ Lauren Han took to the court.
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The two locked horns last season, with Han (a sophomore at the time) winning the state championship 6-3, 6-4.
This year, the matchup went a little differently.
Feldman won the girls singles title on Saturday 7-5, 6-1 to end her senior season with a gold medal.
With last season’s matchup still in everyone’s mind, Feldman said the biggest key for this year’s finals match was that she knew this was her last high school competition. The goal for the tournament was to win a title. But Feldman’s goal for the day was to enjoy herself.
“She’s such a great player and I was just trying to go out there and have fun, to be honest,” Feldman said. “I know that I was just super nervous last time and a lot of things were going her way and I just had to go out and play my game.”
Westview coach Tom Lefor mirrored Feldman’s sentiment, saying that “she was her own worst enemy” in last year’s championship match, where she struggled to stay composed and unforced errors piled up. This season, she was focused. Another key was that Feldman knew that she didn’t have anything to lose on Saturday afternoon.
“I was way more relaxed,” she said. “Like last year I was so tight. This year I think the tables just went my way a little bit. I made less unforced errors. Just the little things.”
Even from the stands, Lefor could see how Feldman was cruising on Saturday.
“She got into her zone right there and just really reduced the unforced errors,” he said. “Her serve started kicking in. Lauren is such a great competitor. It was a great match. She just had to overcome that little bit.”
In order to prepare for the finals match, Lefor said Feldman took herself away from the tennis being played on the courts earlier in the afternoon as she found somewhere quiet to focus on herself.
“She just kind of removed herself from this atmosphere a little bit,” Lefor said, motioning to the bleachers where the Class 5A singles championships were still being played. “Get away from the hype. Take deep breaths and just focus on what you’re going to bring today. That’s exactly what she did. When I talked to her a couple of different times before the match, she was smiling. She was loose and she was just in a really good headspace and that’s what you need going into a match like this in tennis.”
On the doubles side, Jesuit’s team of Sofia Bell and Mishi Batinkova beat Sheldon’s Emerson and Hayden Kearney 6-4, 6-3 for the state championship. Bell, a basketball star for the Crusaders and an Oregon women’s basketball commit, was playing just her first year of varsity tennis in Oregon. She lost her freshman spring season to COVID-19, her sophomore season was an unofficial shortened season and she was ineligible as a junior after transferring from St. Mary’s.
Bell and Batinkova may have been the most unlikely duo in the tournament, as they have only been playing together for a few weeks and were unseeded in the district tournament.
The Crusaders won the team title with 19 points. It’s Jesuit 16th girls tennis state championship (an OSAA record) but its first team title since 2015.
Second place in the team race was reigning champion Westview with 16 points. Third was Sheldon with 12 points.
— Nik Streng, nstreng@oregonian.com, @NikStreng
