For the third time this year, Anna Bright/Rachel Rohrabacher and Anna Leigh Waters/Catherine Parenteau will square off for women’s doubles gold.

Bright/Rohrabacher kicked off gender doubles semi-final action on the women’s side with an 11-8, 10-12, 11-9 victory over No. 6 seeds Jorja Johnson/Vivian Glozman.

This was a rematch of a semi-final match from Bristol last August that also ended in a three-game triumph for ‘The Girlies.’

In Saturday’s encounter, the No. 2 seeds had a single match point at 10-8 in the second game, but Johnson/Glozman scored five points in a row to stay alive and bring on the decider.

They carried that momentum with them into the early stages of Game 3 and had a 6-2 lead when teams switched sides for the final time.

From there, though, Bright/Rohrabacher went to work.

Guided by some scrappy defense and smart decision-making in lengthy rallies, they tied things up at 7-7 and eventually escaped from the third game with an 11-9 triumph.

With another matchup against Waters/Parenteau looming, Rohrabacher took a moment to reflect on how her mentality surrounding the matchup has changed since the first time the teams faced off the 2024 PPA Masters.

“At the beginning of last year, I was also still pretty new to the game, so I looked at it a little differently because I hadn’t played them as much,” she said. “I think now that we have had that experience of beating them a few times, we have that chip on our shoulder of knowing that it is possible. That belief is there.”

Speaking of Waters and Parenteau, they defeated No. 4 seeds Lacy Schneemann/Meghan Dizon 11-2, 11-0 in a brutally dominant 19-minute thrashing on Humana Championship Court.

Both players had lost their mixed doubles matches earlier in the day, but it was clear that neither one would let those results play a role in their women’s doubles contest.

“I think the long break between our matches was actually an advantage,” Parenteau shared. “Usually, we have to go back-to-back but when we lost, the long break kind of helped us to just kind of get rid of that mixed loss and just focus on women’s doubles next.”

The most recent encounter between these two juggernaut duos came in the final of the Proton Tucson Open, which Waters/Parenteau won 11-0, 11-2, 11-4.

Bright/Rohrabacher will look to turn the tide on Sunday in Mesa.