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The Berkeley-Alameda girls tennis playoff ended in tears and consternation on Thursday, and the match wasn’t even decided. 

The deciding match between Berkeley’s Gail Nipitnorasete and Alameda’s Erika Fong was suspended after two sets, tied 1-1, due to darkness, and the players were to meet this morning to play the final set at a neutral court in Berkeley. But reaching that decision was a long and painful process, with opposing coaches butting heads over whether to continue or postpone the match. 

After Nipitnorasete came back from a 3-0 game deficit to win the second set 7-6 in a tiebreaker, both coaches agreed that it was too dark to start the third set. Berkeley coach Alex Kopel suggested moving to a lighted court nearby to finish the match, but Alameda’s coaches urged Fong to hold out for a postponement. The strain proved too much for the Alameda freshman, who burst into tears under the pressure. 

“There’s no reason for high school tennis to make a girl a wreck,” Kopel said. 

With a neutral site coordinator contributing and Fong’s father removing her from the situation things calmed down a bit, but the resolution still took more than 30 minutes to sort out. Nipitnorasete is taking the SAT on Saturday and didn’t want to play Friday after school, while the Alameda coaches didn’t want to wait until next week to finish the match. Instead, each player will miss their morning classes to meet this morning at 9:30 a.m. 

Several Berkeley players expressed outrage at the apparent gamesmanship by the Alameda coaches with the momentum of the match clearly in Nipitnorasete’s favor. 

The stakes are very high, as the winner will earn her team an automatic bid to the North Coast Section team playoffs, while the losing team will be forced to apply for an unlikely at-large berth despite co-champion status. Both teams finished the ACCAL season at 9-1 and split their regular-season matches. 

The Nipitnorasete-Fong match was expected to decide the issue, as Berkeley swept the other three singles and lost all three doubles matches according to form. All of the other six matches were finished when Nipitnorasete began her comeback, with the teams cheering from opposite sides of the court.