BEA TAN and Pau Soriano of Foton Hurricane leaned on steely nerves at crunch time to turn back Danica Gendrauli and Norie Diaz of Gilligan’s, 18-21, 21-18, 15-12, yesterday and reach the quarterfinals of the PLDT Home Ultera-Philippine Superliga Beach Volleyball Challenge Cup.
Tan scored on a drop shot to push her team to a 13-12 lead before Gendrauli committed back-to-back attacking errors that handed Foton Hurricane a second straight victory in the tourney before a large crowd at SM By the Sands in SM Mall of Asia.
“In beach volleyball, whichever team commits more error loses, we are just fortunate they committed errors in the endgame,” said Tan, who used to play beach volley in college at Ateneo before playing as a libero in indoor volleyball.
Despite practicing thrice a week on the same court, Tan and Soriano encountered rough sailing in the first set as Gendrauli and Diaz battled back with powerful serves and well-placed hits.
Crowd favorites Gretchen Ho and Charo Soriano of Petron XCS notched their first win in the tourney with a 21-8, 21-9 triumph over Rochet dela Paz and Aurora Tripoli of Accel Quantum Plus B-Perpetual Molino.
The win enabled Ho and Soriano to stay in contention after losing their opener last week.
Also posting their first win were Alexa Micek and Fille Cayetano of Petron Sprint 4T, who hacked out a 22-20, 21-15 win over another pair of crowd darlings Cha Cruz and Micmic Laborte of Cignal A.