Bay Area's Ma, 15, qualifies for 60K Berkeley

   Connie Ma, a 15-year-old wild card playing only 25 miles (40 kilometers) from home, qualified for the $60,000 Berkeley Tennis Club Challenge on a day of high drama.
   Ma, from Dublin in the San Francisco Bay Area, advanced today with a 5-7, 6-3, 6-3 victory over Alycia Parks, 17, of the United States. Ma, serving for the match at 5-3 in the third set, trailed 15-40 but won the next four points.
   In the first two rounds of qualifying, Ma beat McCartney Kessler, an incoming freshman at Florida, and fourth-seeded Anastasia Nefedova, ranked No. 526 in the world, in straight sets.
   Parks was coming off a 6-0, 6-2 victory over 29-year-old American Ashley Weinhold, a former top-200 singles player and the Sacramento Challenger doubles champion in 2015 and 2016 with Caitlyn Whoriskey.
   Ma, ranked seventh nationally in the girls 16s, is scheduled to face eighth-seeded Mayo Hibi of Japan on Wednesday at noon on Court 4. Hibi, who was born in Japan but grew up in Irvine in the Los Angeles region, won the singles title in the 2013 Sacramento Challenger at age 17. The tournament lost its sponsor after a six-year run and moved to Berkeley this year.
   Ma is competing in her third pro tournament. She played $25,000 hard-court tourneys in Sumter, S.C., and Baton Rouge, La., in consecutive weeks in June, losing in the first round of qualifying to 29-year-old Olga Govortsova, who climbed to a career-high No. 35 10 years ago, and then reaching the quarterfinals as a qualifier.
   All four of today's final-round qualifying matches lasted three sets, and two went to third-set tiebreakers.
   No. 7 seed Lorraine Guillermo, a former Pepperdine All-American, survived a match point and edged No. 2 Sabrina Santamaria, a 2013 NCAA doubles champion from USC, 2-6, 6-1, 7-6 (8).
   No. 8 Haruna Arakawa, 18, of Japan nipped Andreea Ghitescu of Romania 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (2).
   And Pamela Montez, a 27-year-old former UCLA All-American, topped Michaela Gordon, 18, of Saratoga in the Bay Area, 4-6, 6-3, 4-3, retired. Gordon played No. 1 singles and doubles as a freshman on Stanford's NCAA championship team in the spring.
   Here are the Berkeley singles qualifying draw, singles and doubles main draws and Wednesday's schedule.