Anna Leigh Waters/Catherine Parenteau kicked off Championship Sunday action at the Arizona Athletic Grounds with a 4-11, 11-9, 5-11, 11-8, 11-1 victory over No. 2 seeds Anna Bright/Rachel Rohrabacher.

The top seeds dominated this matchup a few weeks ago in the final of the Proton Tucson Open, but Sunday’s bout was much, much more competitive.

One of the things that helped Bright/Rohrabacher earn a 2-1 advantage through the first three games was hitting heavy topspin drops that Waters and Parenteau had to hit off the bounce as they came up to the kitchen line after the return. 

“I think it just helps us get in. We want to make people reach for those shots and put pressure on them while they do it,” Rohrabacher said of the drop-heavy strategy. “We got a lot of points off that in the second set, even though we ended up losing it.”

Waters and Parenteau countered that strategy in the final two games by improving the depth of their returns.

“I think the returns were the main thing,” Waters recalled. “If you can get it in the last third of the court, it’s much tougher to hit good thirds, and I felt like we were hitting pretty short returns in the first couple of games.”

Third shots also played an important role of the tactics of Waters/Parenteau. They began the match driving most of their third shots, but they began turning to more drops as the match progressed.

“I felt like we were just taking the thirds earlier,” she said. “We were initially trying to put pressure on them with the drives, but then they started really punishing the volleys and we weren’t getting to the net on our serves, so we had to mix it up.”

After taking a back-and-forth Game 4 to bring on the decider, Waters/Parenteau ran away with the fifth game in just seven minutes to win their fourth straight match against the ‘The Girlies.’

Even though Sunday’s bout ended in a defeat, Rohrabacher has hope for future matchups with the adjustments that she and Bright made coming into this match.

“We’re just going to continue getting more comfortable with new shots and adjustments we are making,” she said. “It was encouraging to see how well we did with them with just a week of implementation, so hopefully that can continue, and we can do better next time.”

In the bronze medal match, Jorja Johnson/Vivian Glozman defeated Lacy Schneemann/Meghan Dizon by an 11-1, 11-5 score line.