Tennis: Saratoga High’s Crystal Yen repeats as player of the year

Crystal Yen hadn’t lost a tennis match all season, and she wasn’t about to start now.

The Saratoga senior trailed St. Francis junior Mary Closs for much of the first set of the Central Coast Section girls championship match Nov. 22 at Los Gatos’ Courtside Club. Yet just when Closs clung to a 5-4 lead and seemed poised to win the set, Yen flipped an internal switch.

Suddenly, Yen’s will to win became audible: With every squeak of her shoes as she skidded to a stop on the court in preparation for a shot, with every grunt as she threw all her power into striking the ball, Yen declared that losing was not an option.

Not only did Yen force a tiebreaker with Closs, she won the set 7-6, then dominated the second set 6-1 to clinch her second straight CCS crown.

“She’s a fighter,” Saratoga coach Tom Uyehara said. “Over the past four seasons she’s developed into a strong, solid player. Every time she steps on the court, she wants to win.”

Yen, the Mercury News girls tennis player of the year for the second year in a row, has done plenty of that the past two seasons. Not only did she finish the 2011 season with a perfect 26-0 record — helping Saratoga finish second in CCS and NorCal — she was 23-2 in 2010.

Not that Yen is invincible on the court. One of the reasons she was so driven to beat Closs was that she’d lost to Closs before, in June in the USTA’s NorCal under-18 semifinals, and she feared it would happen again.

“I’d had a good streak of wins going, and Mary broke it for me,” Yen said.

After Yen avenged that loss in the CCS final, Closs conceded that beating Yen takes some doing.

“She’s a steady baseliner,” Closs said. “You’ve got to get her out of her comfort zone. She gets back fast and she runs a lot of balls down.”

Yen’s foot speed, developed through rigorous conditioning, allows her to be very aggressive, according to Uyehara.

“Her footwork is tremendous,” he said. “She’s a scrambler on defense, and that quality makes her able to move from defense to offense very quickly. Her foot speed enables her to get to many balls to make that one extra shot, and sometimes that one extra shot is what’s going to win you the point.”

Yen has narrowed her top college choices to Harvard, Stanford and Santa Clara.

“Crystal can go however far she wants to go (in tennis),” Uyehara said. “She’s smart, she’s driven and determined, and she should make an impact wherever she goes, just as she has for me for four seasons. Her game is well-suited to the NCAA level.”