The Napa High girls tennis team isn’t a lock for its third straight Monticello Empire League title anymore, now that the Indians are tied for first place with the MEL’s other Indians.

Armijo paid Napa back for handing it a 6-3 loss in Fairfield on Sept. 10, edging host Napa 5-4 last Monday. The teams both have 8-1 MEL marks now.

The pressure will be on Napa this week as it hits the road on Monday to face fourth-place Wood (4-5 MEL), and even more on Wednesday when it visits third-place Vacaville (6-3 MEL). The Bulldogs have lost only to Armijo and Napa.

———

Big Game III in boys soccer will be at 7 p.m. Saturday at Memorial Stadium, and it will be bigger than the first and second versions.

Vintage is 7-0 in the MEL heading into Tuesday’s and Thursday’s matches against Fairfleld and Armijo, though its won its last four league matches by one point each. One of those was a 2-1 decision over Napa, which also lost to the Crushers 3-1 in the Vintage Classic at the start of the season.

Napa (6-1 MEL), which plays Vacaville on Tuesday and Wood on Thursday, has won by a one-point margin only once in league — over Armijo. The rest have been by larger margins thanks largely to its returning the league’s best player, Max Alvarez.

———

For the second week in a row, one of the best efforts from the Napa JV football team — pound for pound — has come from Meyer Dorfman in the game’s closing minutes. The diminutive Dorfman is listed at 5-foot, 100 pounds on the Indians’ roster, but head coach Nick Tedesco admitted the sophomore running back is actually about 72 pounds and not quite 5 feet tall.

But two Fridays ago in Vallejo, No. 11 got in on the final drive and was thrown for a couple of losses, before juking his way to a first down on the last play. This past Friday night, in front of a Homecoming crowd, he was on the verge of scoring after getting a yard to the Casa Grande 3-yard line. After getting two yards to the 1, he was inexplicably taken out and a larger teammate took it in on the next play. Tedesco explained that Dorfman taken out because he’d had his bell rung.

“We tried to get him a touchdown because he takes such a beating on scout teams in practice,” Tedesco said.

———

Congratulations to Cheri Piscia-Nichols, the 1990 Vintage High alumna I wrote about in a feature that ran Sept. 7. She teamed with two other local mothers to finish first among the women’s relay teams at the Cliff Bar Team Challenge triathlon at Folsom Lake last weekend.

Kerry Gorman, Katie Aaron and Piscia-Nichols, competing as the “NV Tri Moms,” finished in 1 hour, 55 minutes.

After Gorman completed the three-quarter-mile swim in 21 minutes, Piscia-Nichols had to run three-quarters of a mile from the lake to the bike because the lake level was so low. It took her six minutes to get to Aaron, the cyclist, who completed the 13-mile bike leg in 44 minutes. Piscia-Nichols finished the relay with a five-mile run that took 46 minutes.

Piscia-Nichols began competing in triathlons in 2001 to celebrate her victory over ovarian cancer the year before. She stopped tri-ing after 2002 when her job left her too busy to train, but picked it up again after she became a mother in 2006.

She said her last race of this season will be the Tri Girl Tri at Lake Berryessa on Oct. 11. The all-women’s event features a half-mile swim, an 11-mile bike leg and a 5K run.