Title for Rio Mesa’s Brymer

Top-seeded Tiffany Brymer gave Oxnard Rio Mesa High its third Southern Section individual girls’ tennis title in four years with a 5-7, 6-2, 6-2 victory over third-seeded Luana Magnani of San Marino on Friday at the Racquet Club of Irvine. In 1995 and 1996, Rio Mesa’s Zuzana Stunova won the championship.

Like last year’s champion, Marissa Irvin of North Hollywood Harvard-Westlake, Brymer didn’t play high school tennis until her senior year.

“First time, last time,” said the USC-bound Brymer, who attended Weil Tennis Academy in Ojai last year. “[The section tournament] is a big thing. That’s pretty much why I played it, to win it.”

Brymer, whose brother Chris played football at USC and currently plays guard for the Miami Dolphins, won by overcoming her emotional outbursts and the steady baseline play of Magnani, a sophomore. With a 2-1 lead in the second set, Brymer was given a warning for abusive language. A game later, umpire Jan Ryan told Brymer and Magnani to settle down.

Once Brymer calmed down, she stopped making unforced errors and won 10 of the next 12 games to finish the match.

In the doubles final, second-seeded Adriana Hockicko and Danielle Hustedt of Irvine Woodbridge needed only 43 minutes to defeat Kristen Case and Audra Adams of Newport Harbor, 6-0, 6-0. Three weeks ago, Case and Adams defeated the Woodbridge pair to win the Sea View League title.

“I thought they were going to come back,” Hockicko said. “I was thinking, ‘This can’t be.’ It’s hard to believe it was so easy.”