CULVER — With Wednesday’s Culver Girls Academy Regional final set to boil down to the three singles match between Warsaw freshman Alyssa Zellers and Plymouth senior Ashley Harrell and with Zellers trailing 3-0 in the second set, Lady Tigers head coach Rick Orban gave his frosh some fairly straightforward instructions.

Those instructions were easy enough to deliver but a much taller order to execute. The response Zellers gave was an equally simple one. Then she went back out and made good on her word.

Zellers battled back to force a second-set tiebreak with Harrell, then rolled to a 7-2 tiebreaker win to give the Tigers the decisive match point in a 3-2 repeat regional championship win over No. 21 Plymouth.

“This may sound cruel, but I looked right at her and said ‘OK, one doubles just won. Now, you’re going to take this to a 6-6 tie, you’re going to go to a tiebreak, and you’re going to win it,’” said Orban of his pep talk with Zellers in the second set. “And she just looked at me, and she said ‘OK.’ It was a comforting feeling for me.

“It just shows how tough she can be.”

Wednesday’s regional finale was a clash between arch-rivals, and the dramatic finish lived up to its billing as Warsaw avenged a 3-2 regular-season loss to the Pilgrims.

While Zellers’ 6-4, 7-6 (7-2) win over Harrell secured the Tigers their final match point, the reversal came at one doubles, where Warsaw senior Athena Schlitt and junior partner Colette Smith faced off against a tandem that had already beaten them twice this season in Plymouth’s Kendall Dreibelbis and McKenzie Scheetz.

Like Zellers, Schlitt and Smith won their first set only to find themselves trailing in the second set, theirs a 5-2 deficit. They took four of the next five games but found themselves behind once more in the tiebreak, 2-0. Unshaken, the Warsaw duo delivered with their backs against the wall one more time with seven straight points to complete a 6-2, 7-6 (7-2) win over their Plymouth counterparts and knot Wednesday’s championship at 2-2, setting the stage for a clincher at three singles.

“We didn’t come into this thinking ‘We’ve lost to them twice.’ We came into it thinking ‘We can do this,’” said Schlitt.

“I’m just so excited. It’s been an amazing season. Going on as a team and coming back to beat Plymouth 3-2 is just so exciting.”

If Orban was free to give Zellers instructions during change-overs, it was partly because wife and assistant Jan was on hand to guide Schlitt and Smith, and Orban highlighted that fact after the meet.

“Jan tonight, she coached that one doubles through it. I couldn’t do it without her — the experience we have, the trust we have with each other. She’s my wife, too,” he said. “I never went over there. I never looked. I didn’t have to because I knew that she could bring the best out of them.”

Zellers also got a boost from Tiger two singles Ella Knight, who was first off a court over from the freshman at the Gable Tennis Complex indoor facility.

Coming off a bumpy start on the way to a three-set win in Tuesday’s regional opener with Rochester, Knight was dominant Wednesday, putting away Erin Hunter 6-2, 6-0 to stake Warsaw to an early 1-0 lead.

“She played Ella Knight tennis from the very beginning, just dominated,” Orban said. “That helped Alyssa. Alyssa said ‘Wow, Ella is playing great.’ For that to happen being a freshman — knowing it’s going to come down close to the end because we were kind of keeping track — just gave her that boost of confidence.”

Rachel Boyle and Rachel Herendeen couldn’t hold off Plymouth’s Cortni Cook and Leah Smith at the tail end of a close first set at two doubles to fall 7-5, 6-0, while Pilgrims number one Lanae Singleton survived in the state singles tournament with her 6-4, 6-1 win over Warsaw’s Liza Lewis.

With their second straight regional title in hand and 11th overall in program history, the Tigers (14-3) now advance to play the winner of Thursday’s LaPorte Regional final between No. 24 Penn (17-4)  and No. 7 South Bend St. Joseph (21-1) at the Culver Academies Semistate Saturday at noon. St. Joe defeated the Tigers 5-0 in last year’s semistate matchup at Culver Academies.