Two South Australians have made their way through to the girls’ 18\/u Australian Championships, with 15-year-old Charlotte Kempenaers-Pocz defeating fourth seed Annerly Poulos to advance to the final, where she will meet fellow South Australian, Natasha Russell.<\/p>\n
Kempenaers-Pocz, a wildcard into the event, is yet to drop a set in five matches \u2014 her latest result a 6-3 6-2 domination of Poulos.<\/p>\n
This time last year, the South Australian was contesting the 14\/u final at the December Showdown.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I\u2019m just hitting the ball very well, staying composed, staying strong and (playing) a lot better than last year,\u201d she told\u00a0tennis.com.au<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think (the difference this year) is my composure. I\u2019m not giving in or giving up and I just keep going and fighting for every point.<\/p>\n \u201c(The final is) just a match. I\u2019m putting no pressure on myself and just trying to play as well as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n There she will meet Russell, a three-set winner over Taylah Lawless.<\/p>\n Russell finished second in Group A behind Kempenaers-Pocz with two wins and one loss, advancing to the quarterfinal stage where she beat Jasmine Adams on Thursday before stopping Lawless.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t had the best lead in to this tournament and I didn\u2019t expect to really do that well here, so I was just really proud of myself that I got through that with an injury and a battle in the head kind of thing,\u201d she explained, referring to her emotional reaction following the 4-6 6-3 6-3 victory.<\/p>\n \u201cI was zoning out a lot. Towards the end when it got to 2-all (in the third set) I was really well focused and was able to battle through it better than her.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just really happy with myself that I\u2019ve made it so far.\u00a0I always hope to do the best I can and I\u2019ve done really well this tournament, so I\u2019m just really happy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two South Australians have made their way through to the girls’ 18\/u Australian Championships, with 15-year-old Charlotte Kempenaers-Pocz defeating fourth seed Annerly Poulos to advance to the final, where she will meet fellow South Australian, Natasha Russell. Kempenaers-Pocz, a wildcard into the event, is yet to drop a set in five matches \u2014 her latest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5736,"featured_media":19596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5736"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}