IRVINE, June 20, 2026 (Media Release)

Spencer Johnson has been knocking on the door in search of his first professional championship on the SoCal Pro Series for the better part of a year. All there’s left to do is to find a way to crash the weekend party, and there’s nowhere else the Ladera Ranch resident would rather do it than at the Racquet Club of Irvine, his tennis home away from home.

UCLA’s returning senior ace has made it 3-for-3 in reaching Saturday’s singles semifinals during this season’s SoCal Pro Series after a 6-3, 7-5 victory over German Neo Niedner, of the University of San Diego, in a Friday quarterfinal at the $15,000 ITF World Tennis Tour/USTA Pro Circuit event hosted and managed by USTA Southern California.

Johnson, 23, has now reached the semifinal stage in five consecutive SoCal Pro Series appearances dating back to last year. He came up short in a June 2025 final at Lakewood Tennis Center against Trevor Svajda, and the 6-foot-3 Bruins No. 1 has since suffered three successive semifinal defeats in the series. He feels he has the game to break through that Final Four barrier and into the winner’s circle this weekend.

“Yeah, for sure. I was right there last year and feeling better this year, so I think that can happen,” said Johnson, who is also playing for his first doubles title Saturday with his Bruins teammate Emon van Loben Sels, whom he partnered with on six occasions during the 2026 NCAA season.

“I lived in Utah but when I would go to California, I’d hit a lot at RCI, so it’s fun to come back to where I used to play a lot. It’s really cool that we can play all these pro tournaments and I can stay at my house. Super grateful. It’s cool to play a bunch of tournaments in a row while I’m in college because that’s what I’m going to end up doing. There’s a lot of good players in SoCal and we all get that feel (of professional competition) while we’re still in college. It’s been awesome for my game.”

Johnson’s 11 a.m. semifinal opponent is North Carolinian and 2017 Northwestern graduate Strong Kirchheimer (No. 2 seed), who defeated San Diegan Noah Zamora (No. 5 seed), 6-3, 6-4, in Friday’s quarterfinals.

Johnson-van Loben Sels knocked off top-seeded doubles duo and last week’s SoCal Pro Series Jack Kramer Club winners Reece Falck and Billy Suarez, 6-1, 3-6, 10-6 to advance to Saturday’s doubles final against Zamora, a 2025 UC Irvine graduate, and Los Angeles resident Sam Landau, who is coming off his redshirt junior season at Indiana.

Zamora-Landau eliminated Americans Liam Krall and Henry Lieberman, 7-6(2), 6-4, in Friday’s other semifinal and they seek their first ITF pro title.

On the women’s side, seventh-seeded Midori Castillo Meza, who was born in Chula Vista, raised in Tijuana and graduated from Arizona as the Wildcats’ No. 1 player last year, advanced to her first ITF Futures semifinal after upending fourth-seeded Sacramento-area teenager Alexis Nguyen, 7-6(5), 6-4.

Castillo Meza, 22, plays tennis under the Mexican flag and has played in three of the first four SoCal Pro Series events in 2026. She plays in an 11 a.m. semifinal against Russian Alina Shcherbinina, who won last week’s SoCal Pro Series women’s singles title at Jack Kramer Club.

As the No. 2 seed in doubles, Castillo Meza and Brandelyn Fulgenzi advanced to the women’s final by edging North Carolina senior Kaitlyn Carnicella and former Pepperdine University product Jasmine Conway, 6-2, 4-6, 10-8 in a Friday semifinal.

In their quest for a first pro doubles crown, the former Arizona teammates will face united crosstown rivals in UCLA’s Kate Fakih and USC’s Lily Fairclough, which ousted La Canada Flintridge native and returning Princeton senior Tsehay Driscoll and Brazilian Eduarda Piai, 7-6(4), 6-3. Fairclough has won seven ITF doubles titles in the past three years, with three of those coming on the 2025 SoCal Pro Series.

San Diego native Bryce Nakashima, brother of Brandon Nakashima (No. 32 ATP ranking), reached his first pro tournament semifinal after a 6-1, 6-4 blitzing of incoming Stanford recruit Ronit Karki, the No. 8 seed who was a past USTA Junior No. 1 and the 2025 Junior Championships singles runner-up at Wimbledon.

A faithful player for all five years of the SoCal Pro Series, the 22-year-old Nakashima has five ITF doubles titles to his name. The returning Ohio State senior is using this SoCal Pro Series summer to work on his game, and he has improved to the point of reaching his first ITF weekend action in singles.

“Every summer I come back to play these and, whether you use it as a way to get points or a way to just get more matches in from the offseason when you play college tennis, it’s a great way to do all of that,” Nakashima said.

UCLA returning junior Rudy Quan, the 2025 Big Ten Conference Freshman of the Year, did not join his teammate, Johnson, in Saturday’s singles semifinals. The Thousand Oaks resident dropped a 3-6, 6-2, 4-6 result to 2025 Big Ten Player of the Year and 2025-26 NCAA All-American Kenta Miyoshi (No. 4 seed), who faces Nakashima in the 12 p.m. men’s singles semifinal.

Santa Monica-born Monika Ekstrand, who used to train in Burbank as a young junior before moving to Florida, is the highest remaining women’s seed after the No. 2 seed and returning Stanford sophomore dispatched New Yorker Theadora Rabman, 7-5, 6-3. Ekstrand’s 12 p.m. semifinal foe will be Carnicella, last week’s SoCal Pro Series singles runner-up.

To learn more about the SoCal Pro Series, go to socalproseries.com.