RANCHO SANTA FE, July 11, 2026 (Media Release)

This weekend’s final four in men’s singles at Rancho Santa Fe Tennis Club has shaped up to be an admirable advertisement of Southern California’s collegiate tennis scene.

There is also a survival-of-the-fittest theme in play amongst this quartet this week, with one man on the brink of achieving rarefied status in the five-year history of the SoCal Pro Series.

Ladera Ranch resident Spencer Johnson, UCLA’s returning senior ace who returned to the SoCal Pro Series as this week’s top seed, coasted to a 6-2, 6-4 victory over sixth-seeded New Yorker Ronald Hohmann to book his fifth semifinal in as many SoCal Pro Series appearances during Friday’s quarterfinal action from the $15,000 USTA Pro Circuit and World Tennis Tour event hosted and managed by USTA Southern California.

Johnson, 23, took last week off of the SoCal Pro Series after winning his first two professional singles championships in Irvine and Claremont consecutively. The Bruins’ No. 1 player in 2026 ran his SoCal Pro Series win streak to 13 matches and is two wins away from concluding this summer’s series in becoming the second man to win at least three SoCal Pro Series men’s singles crowns.

Irvine native Learner Tien (ATP Tour No. 17 ranking) is the circuit’s all-time leader in singles titles with five, with four of those coming two short years ago, and the fourth crown occurring at Rancho Santa Fe Tennis Club in 2024.

Johnson’s semifinal foe at 10 a.m. Saturday is Dutchman Stian Klaassen, who completed his University of San Diego tennis career in May as the Toreros’ No. 2 player. Klaassen outlasted 2026 Ohio State graduate and captain Jack Anthrop, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4, in two hours, 54 minutes on Friday.

Klaassen, 23, has double duty on Saturday as he and partner Alex Chang, a 2025 Cal graduate and 2026 Stanford graduate student, reached the men’s doubles final after edging second-seeded San Diegan Noah Zamora and Anthrop, 6-4, 6-7(5), 10-6.

Though Klaassen logged four hours and 44 minutes on court Friday between his singles and doubles matches, he is physically raring to go into the weekend. Klaassen-Chang will match up with Johnston and incoming Georgia freshman recruit James Weber, who eked out a 7-5, 7-6(5) result over No. 4 seed Michael Blando, a San Diegan and 2019 Rancho Bernardo High School graduate, and Hugo Hashimoto.

Klaassen will seek his second pro doubles championship after winning his first with former USD teammate Savriyan Danilov on last year’s SoCal Pro Series.

Second-seeded Zamora, the 2021 St. Augustine High School graduate, is intent on winning his first pro title in his native county and advanced to the semifinals for the second consecutive week after emerging with a 7-5, 2-6, 6-4 victory over Georgia returning sophomore Noah Johnston.

Zamora, who graduated from UC Irvine in 2025 as its No. 1 player, said he was glad and confident to get a rematch from last week’s first round, where Zamora only conceded three games to Johnston in a straight-set win.

He got more than he bargained for in spending two hours and 40 minutes in dispatching Johnston on Friday, and Zamora has gone three sets in each of his three wins this week. Adding in his doubles defeat, Zamora competed on court for four-and-a-half hours on Friday.

Like Johnson, Sacramento resident van Loben Sels is a returning senior from the top three players in the Bruins’ 2025-26 lineup, comfortably got past Reece Flack, 6-1, 7-5, in just over an hour-and-a-half, and may benefit from not playing doubles this week and coming into his Saturday semifinal with fresher legs than his opponent, Zamora.

Playing in his fifth SoCal Pro Series event of 2026, this week is the first time van Loben Sels made it out of the first round. For what it’s worth, van Loben Sels lost a three-set match to Zamora the last time they met in January – in the qualifying draw of the San Diego Open (ATP 100 Challenger Tour).

The most competitive quarterfinal of the women’s singles draw saw Jo-Yee Chan, who graduated from San Diego State as the Aztecs’ No. 1 player this year, rally and pull through with a 4-6, 7-5, 6-3 victory over Pasadena resident and UCLA returning junior Kate Fakih (last week’s SoCal Pro Series singles finalist at Barnes Tennis Center) in a three-hour, three-minute marathon.

Chan, the 2026 Mountain West Conference tournament MVP and First-Team MWC selection, advances to her first SoCal Pro Series semifinal since playing in her very first event on the circuit in June 2025 at the University of San Diego. That tournament was also her first World Tennis Tour pro event.

She did bring some positive momentum into the final stretch of the SoCal Pro Series after reaching a semifinal in a USTA Pro Circuit $35K tournament two weeks ago in her native state of Georgia.

Though she has finished up at SDSU and is unsure of how much she wants to commit to touring the pro circuit beyond this week, Chan has decided to stay in San Diego for now and take advantage of local training opportunities offered to her.

“How could I say ‘No’ to that?,” Chan said. “We’ll see where it (tennis) takes me.”

All that is standing in the way of Chan reaching a first pro tournament singles final is a Saturday semifinal meeting with the SoCal Pro Series juggernaut that is No. 3 seed Alina Shcherbinina. She sports a 22-0 record in this summer’s series with three singles championships in the past four weeks (she did not play Week 5 in Claremont) while only dropping one set (via tiebreaker).

Shcherbinina, 22, entered the SoCal Pro Series in Week 3 at Jack Kramer Club as a qualifier and hasn’t looked back. The Russian first entered World Tennis Tour events in her native Moscow in 2018 and never advanced beyond the quarterfinals until hitting the SoCal Pro Series in June.

On paper, the marquee matchup of the women’s quarterfinals looked to be San Diego native and Stanford returning sophomore Alyssa Ahn, the No. 5 seed, facing off against Shcherbinina. Instead, the 2025 Torrey Pines High School graduate was engulfed in the eye of the Shcherbinina storm in a 0-6, 3-6 defeat.

Ahn has played all five years of the SoCal Pro Series, dating back to entering four tournaments in 2022 at age 15. Leading up to meeting former University of Oklahoma product Shcherbinina for the first time, Ahn said she’d look forward to it if it meant advancement into the quarterfinals.

“She’s been undefeated this summer (in the SoCal Pro Series). I haven’t talked too much with other people (in the draw) but I definitely noticed,” Ahn said. “It’s really tough to win one, let alone three.”

True to her record, Shcherbinina gave Ahn the same treatment that she has given everyone else in Southern California over the past month.

The first women’s singles semifinal, at 10 a.m. Saturday, features another Moscow native, Veronika Miroshnichenko against Arizona resident and 2025 University of South Carolina graduate Misa Malkin.

Miroshnichenko, a Loyola Marymount graduate who last played for the Lions in 2023, upset North Carolina-bound top seed Alexis Nguyen, 6-2, 6-1. Malkin downed Oklahoma returning junior Gloriana Nahum, 7-6(6), 6-3.

Saturday’s women’s doubles final includes a bloodline of tennis royalty. El Segundo resident and Vanderbilt returning junior Sophia Webster, the niece of American tennis legend and 14-time Grand Slam champion Pete Sampras, seeks her first pro crown alongside partner Jessica Bernales, a UCLA transfer from Las Vegas, when they take on Ukrainian Anita Sahdiieva and Miroshnichenko.

Webster-Bernales downed Ahn and her Stanford teammate from San Marino, Tianmei Wang, 6-3, 6-3, in Friday’s semifinal. Sahdiieva and Miroshnichenko dispatched Nahum and Oklahoma Sooners teammate Oyinlomo Quadre, 7-6(7), 3-6, 10-3. Sahdiieva has won nine of 14 World Tennis Tour doubles titles on the SoCal Pro Series since 2023 while Miroshnichenko owns seven pro doubles titles.