The streaks stayed intact and with a doubleheader sweep over El Camino College on Friday, the Pasadena City College women's badminton team clinched its fourth straight undefeated South Coast Conference championship.
The Lancers played abbreviated contests v. second-place El Camino, winning 11-0 in match 1 and 11-1 in match 2 at Hutto-Patterson Gymnasium. PCC extended its overall winning streak to 24 matches going back to the start of the 2017 season, stretched its conference win string to 39 over the past four seasons, and a regular-season win streak now at 46 matches.
The architect of the streaks is Lancers head coach Jen Ho, who is 49-2 in her coaching career all in just her fourth season running the program. The defending CCCAA state champion, PCC will host Pacific Coast Athletic Conference champion Irvine Valley College on Wednesday, May 2 in the SoCal Championship match. Game time is 3 p.m. at the H-P Gym.
"I'm proud of the accomplishments but we look ahead to what will be our most difficult match of the season against Irvine Valley," Ho said. "We have to play our best badminton and the ladies are in need of that type of competition if we want to make it to state."
With El Camino bringing only five players (six is a desired minimum ladder), both teams agreed to simply split the number of individual matches to allow for two team match results. Ho played all of her players and it resulted with three singles wins by Jessica Lee, and two each by Amy Huang and Grace Bajar. Solo singles wins were turned in by Natalie Ong, Xiaoming Yao, Asiana Pitackul, Mikaella Reamico and Pinky Cheung.
In doubles, Ong-Yao won two matches, holding their opponents to 26 total points in winning four sets. Reamico-Bajar won a match as did the pair of Huang-Pitackul.
Ho is excited about the news that Bajar has been accepted to attend and transfer to UCLA, although it is purely for academics.
"Grace is an outstanding student and we're happy for her," she said. "She has turned into a good player who has helped us all season."
In the program's history, PCC has won 14 conference badminton titles in 18 seasons of the sport.