Things weren’t looking good for Sammamish’s Anissa Bryant-Swift and Malia Lum.

Sure, they’d won the first set of the district finals against Bainbridge’s Grace Porter and Kate Jameson 6-4. But now they were sitting in a big hole in the second set, which they eventually lost.

Bryant-Swift, a senior, was down. She felt nervous, uncomfortable. That’s when her doubles partner Lum, a junior, threw a few words at her.

“I said ‘Maria Sharapova is the best because she has the worst memory’,” Lum recounted Tuesday. “Even though that was completely cheesy, it was just funny and made her laugh and think about something else.”

It worked. The defending state champions stormed back to win the deciding third set, taking the SeaKing District’s top seed for this weekend’s state tournament in Vancouver.

It’s that ability – the combination of a partner’s intuition of the right thing to say and a friendship that extends well beyond the court – that gives the Sammamish pair an extra edge in the double’s game.

“They have so much fun on the court together,” said Totems coach Mike Laracuente. “It’s not just that they are incredibly talented, but the way they get along, they really are like sisters on the court.”

Whether it’s their patented handshake/racket slap to the tune of the Black Eyed Peas song “Boom Boom Pow”, their bright smiles and persistent laughs or their constant singing of pop songs at practice, it’s evident that this doubles pair is always having a good time.

Do other pairs have this much fun together?

“I don’t know,” Bryant-Swift said with a laugh, “but it sure doesn’t look like it.”

The pairing of the two may not have happened without the painful ending of Bryant-Swift’s sophomore year. The 17-year-old won the KingCo singles title as a freshman and placed sixth in state that year. The following year, she fell short of the state tournament. The loss led Laracuente to consider pairing her with the younger Lum for the 2009 season, to see what the two girls with similar styles could do as a team.

“I didn’t know they’d be as good as they are together,” he said. “They’re amazing, both so bouncy and wild, athletic and free. It was just a matter of Anissa accepting her role in doubles. Now she accepts it and I don’t think she’d be happy just playing singles.”

Now the partnership has blossomed into a close friendship off the court and, of course, success on it. The two rolled through the league last season without losing a match until the district tournament, where they finished third.

Then came the state tournament and the pair mowed through their competition to reach the finals against Catherine Fitch and Catherine Phelps of Lakeside. A 6-2, 6-2 victory later and the pair had themselves a state championship.

“We definitely didn’t expect to win a state title when we started,” Lum said. “That wasn’t our goal – we just wanted to see how it all would go.”

“And then all of a sudden it was like ‘wow, we’re in the finals,'”, Bryant-Swift said. “I remember we were just so focused that we didn’t know we’d won. We just looked at each other after that final point and went ‘wow’.”

If there’s one thing that sets them apart from other teams that helped them win state, both say, it’s their friendship that allows them a unique bond on the court, one that has a cooling effect on both of them.

“We’ve learned how to put each other in check,” Bryant-Swift said. “We’ve seen other partners, where one partner being down drags down them both. There have been times when we’ve been like ‘you’re down and you need to stop.'”

“You just can’t take it personally,” Lum added.

Laracuente says that in 12 years of coaching at Sammamish, he’s never seen a team that works as well together as Bryant-Swift and Lum.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with that kind of connection with each other,” he said. “They’re such clowns, they really are, in a great way. I wouldn’t change them for the world.”

Now the pair find themselves just four victories away from a repeat title as the duo faces Maggie and Molly Henderson of Auburn Mountainview in the first round of the state tournament. It’s a last rodeo of sorts for the pair, since Bryant-Swift will graduate and head to the University of Washington next year.

“I’m going to miss her so much,” said Bryant-Swift. “I don’t want to think about it because it will just make me cry. I’ll miss her because she’s my really good friend and not just my partner.”

What’s left is simply adding another piece of hardware to the pair’s honors.

“The competition has amped up this year and again we don’t really know what to expect,” Lum said. “Even though we took KingCo and Districts, it’s going to be a whole new world.”

“The main thing though is focusing on ourselves,” added Bryant-Swift without missing a beat. “If we do that, that state title is in our grasp. When we’re at our best, it doesn’t matter how other teams play.”

Joel Willits can be reached at 425-453-5045.