2 Teams That Hit Winners Till the End : Tennis: Peninsula and Chadwick high schools are celebrating their championship seasons.

Palos Verdes Peninsula high schools brought home two CIF-Southern Section girls’ tennis championships Tuesday when Peninsula won the 4-A Division title and Chadwick won the 1-A championship at the Claremont Club.

The titles came in different manners. Peninsula, formed with the merger of perennial powers Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills and Miraleste, routed the opposition all season to finish 24-0. The Panthers won the title with a 16-2 victory over Santa Barbara, ending the season with a 402-30 set advantage.

Chadwick, on the other hand, nudged Pasadena Poly, 10-8.

“It’s neat that we’re all on the hill and coming away with a championship,” Chadwick Coach Carolyn Leach said. “(Peninsula) has the strongest team in California and possibly in the nation. We played them earlier this year in an exhibition and we may have won a set, but just the experience of facing players like that made our team stronger.”

Peninsula took early command against Santa Barbara by building a 10-2 lead. Peninsula’s singles players--Nicole London, Janet Lee and Amanda Augustus--won all nine of their matches, outscoring their opponents in overall games, 54-8.

“They are just a tremendous team, really a terrific team,” Santa Barbara Coach Marianne Gordin said. “I think all of the 4-A Southern Section schools were just trying to be the No. 2 team.”

Peninsula scored its easy victory despite missing two of its top nine players. Stephanie Lansdorp and Amber Basica were competing in a national indoor tournament in Michigan.

Where does Peninsula rank in the nation?

“Early in the year someone told me that they saw national rankings in the USA Today, but I never saw those,” Co-coach Tom Cox said. “I know that Torrey Pines is really good and we are going to play them next year, but I want to find out who might be considered better than us because I would definitely like to schedule them.”

Co-coach Jim Hanson had been to Southern Section finals eight of nine years at Miraleste, but this was the first time Cox, formerly the coach at Rolling Hills, had been to the final. Cox said he was disappointed that Tuesday’s match was not more competitive.

“I did miss the tension of being in a close match,” he said.

Leach, the Chadwick coach, experienced plenty of tension as she watched the Dolphins play their third close match with Pasadena Poly this season.

The Prep League rivals played twice in the regular season, with Chadwick winning once on total games, 81-78, and Poly winning the other, 79-75.

The 1-A final was equally intense, with the match coming down to a tie-breaker in a doubles match between Chadwick’s Jenny Lauter and Wendy Ridder and Poly’s Minnie Ingersall and Cathy Rongey.

Leading, 9-8, but trailing in overall games, Chadwick had to win the match in order to win the championship. Lauter and Ridder rallied from 3-5 to force the tiebreaker, which they won, 7-3.

Afterward, Chadwick players rushed the court and celebrated for about 10 minutes.

“They really wanted to go all the way,” Leach said. “We’ve been to the semis four years in a row and I felt this was our best shot at it.”

Had it not been for a comeback singles victory by Chadwick’s Joanna Felton over Miki Kanemitsu, the championship would have gone the other way.

Felton was behind, 5-2, and Chadwick trailed, 8-7, when she rallied for a 7-5 victory in a match filled with long rallies.

“If she hadn’t won that, we’d be down,” Leach said. “She’s a complex kind of kid, a great player; she’s helped pull us through the whole season.”

Though Leach said this was Chadwick’s best opportunity to win a championship, Peninsula expects to be strong again next season with only two seniors departing.

“The only thing that can stop them is themselves,” Hanson said. “Complacency is the only thing that can keep them from going undefeated the next two years.”