LAKEWOOD, June 6, 2026 (by Steve Pratt)
Two-time junior Grand Slam champion Kristina Penickova’s SoCal Pro Series debut has been a smashing success as the 16-year-old originally from the small town of Campbell outside of San Jose has reached the semifinals of the Lakewood Week 2 $15,000 ITF tournament put on by USTA Southern California.
The No. 8 seeded Penickova beat Studio City native and 2024 Lakewood winner Rachel Gailis, 6-2, 6-1, as she continues her comeback from a wrist injury that had her sidelined from ITF World Tennis Tour events since last November. Penickova will next have the chore of solving Tatum Evans’ game in a 10 a.m. semifinal at the Lakewood Tennis Center on Saturday. Evans has won 10 straight matches in Lakewood since a week ago Monday dropping just two sets.
“I’m just slowly building my way back up the rankings,” said Penickova, who is being coached this week by her father Tomas Penicka with the pair planning on also playing next week’s Jack Kramer Club SoCal Pro Series event. “I’m a California girl so it’s nice to be back.”
Penickova, currently ranked No. 986 in the world, ended 2025 as the No. 1 ITF junior in the world and won both the Australian Open and Wimbledon junior doubles titles last year. In Melbourne she partnered with her twin sister Annika, who this week chose to play in the $100,000 Palmetto Open in Sumter, South Carolina, falling in the first round of qualifying on Monday.
In 2024 at age 14, Penickova made her US Open debut playing in the women’s qualifying. She made her pro debut just two months after turning 14 qualifying and winning her first world ranking point at the Norman, Oklahoma, $15k in October of 2023. Saturday will be her second pro semifinal and she lost in her only finals appearance in Tunisia in May of last year.
Penickova said there is one more junior tournament left for her to play as she plans on coming back to San Diego for the USTA Billie Jean King Girls’ 18s & 16 Nationals in August for a shot at the US Open main draw wild card.
“That’ll be it for me in the juniors,” she said.
Gailis was the No. 4 seed and played her college tennis at the University of Florida. Back in 2024 she said she loved coming back to SoCal having moved away at age 14 to attend a tennis academy in Florida. “I’ve been to this site a million times,” Gailis said in 2024 of her early junior days. “It’s all a blur but I remember playing here [at Lakewood Tennis Center] and won a few titles here.”
In the other women’s semifinal, Canada’s No. 3 seeded Dasha Plekhanova will play in her fifth career ITF semifinal having advanced to two finals and still seeking her first title. Plekhanova beat 24-year-old former Auburn/Georgia Tech/Ole Miss player and No. 6 seeded Ava Hrastar, 6-4, 6-0.
Plekhanova next faces No. 2 Mayu Crossley, the UCLA standout from Tokyo, Japan, who took out former San Diego State standout Jo-Yee Chan, 6-4, 6-2.
Having been a full-time pro on the men’s tour for the past six months, Iiro Vasa (pronounced EE-ro VAH-sah), who graduated from the University of San Diego in December, has slowly been working his way up the world rankings ladder. On Friday, the qualifier Vasa advanced to just his second career pro semifinal (with eight quarterfinal appearances) in 46 tournaments having won his only title in his native Finland in 2023.
Vasa will next meet fellow qualifier Oliver Ojakaar from the University of Texas by way of Estonia. Both players had solid straight-set wins over Big Ten Conference stalwarts with Vasa beating Ozan Baris from Michigan State and Ojakaar taking out No. 2 seeded Kenta Miyoshi, who was the 2025 Big Ten Player of the Year at Illinois.
“I’m pretty sore, but doing OK physically,” said Vasa, who was down a match point in the second round against Aleksa Ciric and down 5-1 in a 10-point tiebreaker in a qualifying match. “It’s great to be back here. I fell in love with San Diego during my four years there and hope to move back there someday.”
The 2022 West Coast Conference Freshman of the Year, Vasa is a member of the Finnish Davis Cup team. His brother Eero Vasa played for Pepperdine.
In the other semifinal it will be 18-year-old Oliver Bonding from Surrey, England, taking on the only remaining seeded player Dmitry Popko from Kazakhstan. The No. 4 Popko took out Neo Niedner, a German who played at University of San Diego, in one of the eight straight-set matches on the day with none splitting sets and going to a third. Bonding attended high school in Wimbledon and won seven ITF junior singles titles and five in doubles. He played in the Wimbledon junior doubles final with Jagger Leach and in January enrolled at Texas Christian University. All Bonding did was help lead the Horned Frogs to the Big 12 Conference title and was named the postseason tournament’s Most Valuable Player. He picked up his first professional singles title at age 17 winning at the M15 in Lannion (France) in February of 2025.
Bonding beat qualifier Marko Mesarovic, 6-4, 6-2. Mesarovic, a Clemson senior from Austin, Texas, also qualified last week.
In the men’s doubles final the Canadian team of Mikael Arsenault and Volodymyr Gurenko will face New Zealand’s Reece Falck (UNC-Wilmington) and Matthew Shearer (Nebraska), who were doubles finalists last week in Lakewood. In the women’s doubles final, it will be No. 1 vs. No. 2 as top-seeded Hrastar and Victoria Mulville will face Kailey Evans and Lily Taylor.
To learn more about the SoCal Pro Series, go to socalproseries.com.
