Herricks' senior Angel Walia wins tennis state championship in singles
Angel Walia of Herricks returns a volley in the state semifinals on Monday. Credit: James Escher
The list of great qualities in Angel Walia’s tennis game is long. The Herricks senior has tremendous court speed and agility. She generates enormous power on her ground strokes from a small frame. Her endurance is hard to match. And then there is the willpower.
Walia needed all of them – but especially the last – as she battled top-seeded Niskayuna sophomore Olivia Dartawan for the state public school singles championship on Wednesday.
Walia, the sixth seed, had gotten off to an overpowering start and banked the first set. But late in the second, Dartawan warded off a match point and converted it into a ton of downhill momentum and a three-point lead in a tiebreaker. That’s where Walia stemmed a tide rising around her by winning six straight points for a 6-2, 7-6 (4) victory at the USTA National Tennis Center in Queens.
“I was like, ‘I'm not playing a third set because a third set could go either way,’ ” Walia said. “She was hungry. I was hungry as well. So I just thought I needed to win those points right there.”
Walia closed the tournament by dispatching the top three seeds to win the title. She is first singles champion from Herricks since Liz Jaffee took the crown in 1981. Long Island has produced three of the last five state singles champs.
Entering the last of her six seasons of high school tennis, Walia hoped to win the Nassau County singles title and, perhaps, the state. That vision vanished when she lost a county semifinal to eventual champ Angelina Bravo of Garden City. It’s also how she ended up with the No. 6 seed and the tough road in the state tourney.
“This is the perfect way to end it,” Walia said. “I was hoping that I could win counties and that didn't happen. So I just worked hard that whole week and fixed my mentality. I reminded myself that this is who I am [and] I could do it.”
And she was on the cusp while serving for the match in the ninth game of the second set. Walia got to match point, but Dartawan saved it and took the game after three deuce points. She won the next game and broke Walia’s serve again for a 6-5 lead. Walia got the break back in the 12th game but looked like she might not have much left when she dropped four of the first five points in the tiebreaker.
“After she was up 4-1, I was like ‘I can't let this go,' ” Walia said. “So I just fought for every point, moved my feet as well as I could and played as aggressive as I could.”
Before serving at her second match point, Walia turned away from the court, smacked the Chase Center tarp. Then she won the point and let out a scream.
“I was just imaging myself as state champ, holding the trophy,” she said. “Then I put everything into that one.”
Double trouble
The top-seeded Great Neck South doubles team of junior Madison Lee and 7th-grader Gabrielle Villegas were not able to give the Island a sweep. The sixth-seeded Horace Greeley team of senior Allison Tsai and junior Michelle Rosenblit broke their serve all seven times and took the title match, 6-1, 6-1.
Neither Lee nor Villegas held serve as they fell back 0-3 in the first set of the doubles final. Though they got a service break in the fourth game, they picked up no momentum as trouble on the service line continued. The duo had six double faults in the first set.
"We came out too inconsistent and they came out very strong and got that early lead,” Lee said. “We didn’t change our game plan when we were losing big. Maybe if we’d tried something new, it would have changed our level of consistency.”
“We didn’t give ourselves a chance,” Villegas said.
They were quickly down 0-4 in the second set and ended up not winning a service game in the match.
“I had a bad day,” Lee said. “Sometimes people have bad days and good days on your serves. I've been having good days, so it was unfair of me to think it's going to stay like that. But there’s nothing I can do – just work on my serve.”
Around the Island
In the doubles fifth-place match, Alex Krol and Chloe Gross of Roslyn won a marathon against Westhampton’s Matilda Buchen and Ava Borruso, 7-5, 4-6, 6-3. The Bayport-Blue Point sisters Emilia and Evie Romano got eighth place. In singles, Bravo took sixth place and Suffolk singles champion Anya Konopka of Smithtown East placed seventh.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
