In 2021, the girls of San Diego’s Canyon Crest Academy (CCA) completed a historic string of four consecutive CIF Open Division tennis team championships that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
The marvel was not just that they won two championships in calendar year 2021 alone or that one of their championships was shared with the CCA boys. Those anomalies emerged from the Covid pandemic, which brought the cancellation of the 2020 fall girls season and creation of the first ever coed season in the Spring of 2021. A girls team championship later in the fall gave the girls two team titles in 2021 as well as a fourth in four years.
A marvel of greater scope was CCA’s supplanting the greatest dynasty in California girls’ sports history.
THE TORREY PINES DYNASTY
The girls tennis team at Torrey Pines High School, 3 miles up the road from CCA, had dominated like no other girls’ high school team in California sports history. Torrey Pines title streaks had started a generation earlier, a year after the Berlin Wall came down and a year before the world wide web’s first page went up. Not only did Torrey Pines win 28 straight league championships, a state record in all girls’ sports, but they also won 28 straight CIF Conference Championships, a girls’ state record in any sport among multi-league conferences.
Just prior to CCA’s ascendancy, the Torrey Pines dynasty was running strong. In the last four seasons of their generational run, Torrey Pines had the state’s best record in CIF State Regional Team tournaments: a 2017 semifinals appearance following a 2016 state championship and two runner-up finishes.
THE FALL & RISE OF JUGGERNAUTS
The changing of the guard between Torrey Pines and CCA came from a perfect storm of player loss, retention and gain.
First, in an extraordinary break in roster continuity, Torrey Pines lost their top six players, five to graduation and one to transfer to CCA. Second, CCA brought back the two top-rated returning players in the conference to a young team whose conference finals appearance the previous year established them as the closest challenger to Torrey Pines.
What staged the next dynasty, however, was CCA’s extraordinary influx of strong players as measured by USTA SoCal rankings and Universal Tennis ratings (UTRs). These players would dominate the next four years of girls tennis in CIF San Diego and turn CCA into an instant national power. CCA, even without its best senior player, currently sits at #6 nationally in the UTR team rankings.
The incoming players were so strong and deep that a team formed of them would have rated higher from top to bottom than any other team in the conference, including a team composed of the returning CCA players.
CCA scooped the three highest-ranked first-year players who completed the season in San Diego County and three of the top-7 in Southern California: Katie Codd, Asha Gidwani and Lyna Fowler.
The transfer of Emily Fowler from Torrey Pines to CCA gave CCA all of the five highest-rated players in the Conference. Emily now plays for UC Irvine, where Gidwani and sister Lyna are set to join her as teammates on tennis scholarships.
Codd was the outlier among outliers. She is presently ranked #2 nationally in the USTA 18&under rankings. Next year, if ratings hold, Codd will be the top-rated player when she steps onto the #6 college team in the country: Duke. Codd launched her high school career by winning the CIF Individual Singles Championship as a first-year. She finished that career by ceding only one point in her final singles match, in the CIF coed team championship round.
Beyond the four future Division I collegiate players, the incoming class in 2018 was also extraordinarily deep. One member, Emma Cao, played her way to the round-of-16 in this year’s CIF Individual Championships as an alternate. Three others this year earned all-conference distinctions in doubles: Grace Wang, Karina Parikh and Sofia Ung.
The depth of CCA accounts for why in CIF team championships CCA has won handily, even though a rebuilding Torrey Pines team sits one spot higher than CCA at #5 in the National UTR Team Rankings. These “Power 6” team UTR rankings only factor the six top-rated players on each team. By contrast, CIF team competition employs nine or ten players. This year’s Torrey Pines team, while featuring CIF Player of the Year Alyssa Ahn, does not match CCA’s unrivaled depth. To illustrate, Cao, while finishing top-16 in the conference in singles, was only 14th on the CCA team ladder for the CIF State Regional Team Championships.
This year CCA’s depth helped its seniors not only cement their claim to a new dynasty via four straight CIF championships, but also nearly win CCA’s first-ever State Regional Championship.
CCA reached the State finals against Westlake High School in Thousand Oaks, which was #1 in the National UTR Team Rankings. CCA’s hope was to win one of the four singles matches and leverage its depth to sweep the three doubles matches. Gidwani delivered a singles victory by dealing Westlake’s Allison Lian her first loss of the season. CCA then won two of the doubles matches to put them on the championship cusp. In a strategic piece of lineup maneuvering, however, Westlake placed their strongest doubles player on the 3rd doubles team and narrowly took the deciding match 6-4 7-6 over Parikh and Ung.
THE NEXT PAGE IN THE RECORD BOOKS
The year 2022, barring season cancellation, will prove whether the CCA dynasty carries forward or represents a blip in the record books marking the passage of a one-time tidal wave of talent. No player rated as highly as Codd, Gidwani or Lyna Fowler has joined the CCA program since their arrival. Once these seniors graduate, will a resurgent Torrey Pines program reestablish its dynasty? Will another program claim a spot in the record books, such as last year’s conference finalist and national #20 Westview? Or could CCA win with depth even without dominant future collegiate players?
Bringing answers to these questions, 2022 promises to be an inflecton point in the battle for supremacy among national powerhouse girls high school programs in San Diego.