BETHLEHEM - The doubles team of Jon Walmach and Jon White from Pleasant Valley had gold medals placed around their necks Monday afternoon after taking a hard fought 7-6 (7-3), 3-6, 6-3 win over a duo from Emmaus in the District 11 Doubles Finals, which were played at Lehigh University.

Walmach and White had one of the tougher runs to the championship of any team in recent history, after conquering Nick Kshatri and Pete Harrison in Friday's semifinals. They came back on Monday to take the gold in a match against Emmaus' Rowan Hobson and Matt FitzMaurice that lasted over two hours and saw Walmach play much of the match with a groin injury that he suffered early in the second set when he lunged for a ball. Throughout the match, Walmach said he felt tightness and could be seen limping at times and stretching to keep the injury from tightening up.While it wasn't easy, Walmach was able to battle through the injury, which he is hoping won't affect him in the District 11 Team Tournament, that gets underway today. In an odd way, Walmach believes the injury might have helped him a little."I think once we fell behind and they broke my serve, I got a little nervous, but this [the injury] actually kept my mind off of it a little bit, but I guess it did throw us off a little bit," said Walmach about the injury.Both teams held serve throughout the first set and the first service brake didn't come until White and Walmach broke service on the sixth point of the tie-breaker to take a 4-2 lead. The Pleasant Valley duo broke service again and went up 5-2 en route to the 7-3 tie-breaker result.In the final game of the second set, the two teams played a tremendous game that featured ten duece points before Emmaus was finally able to put the game away. Hobson was serving in the game, which he hoped would give his team some momentum, but may have had the opposite effect."It really did take a lot out of me," admitted Hobson. "I looked around and everybody else was just going about their business and I was huffing and puffing and sweating like crazy. That was a tough one and it did some damage."Emmaus took to a slightly different strategy in the second set and relied more on a power game, which seemed to throw Pleasant Valley off and had them scrambling. Ironically, Walmach and White experienced the same thing in the second set against Parkland Friday and White thought that was a key to the match."It definitely threw me, but the same thing happened on Friday in that amazing three-set match with Parkland, and that definitely gave us some confidence and experience in this match," White explained.With the score tied at 2-2 in the deciding third set, White and Walmach rattled off wins in three straight games to take a commanding 5-2 lead."Playing timid in doubles doesn't work, you have to be aggressive, put shots away and stay strong," noted White. "I just tried to keep Jon positive. It worked and he played a lot better and we have the medals to show for it."We're best friends on the court and off the court. I've known him for a while now and there's nobody else I would rather win this title with, so that's good."In various games throughout the match, it looked like one duo or the other was going to sail to a win, only to see the other side mount a rally and come from behind. There were only a few, short moments when one side seemed to have true momentum, until late in the third set when Pleasant Valley fans were able to sense victory coming.White and Walmach, who came into the tournament as the No. 2 seed, behind Hobson and FitzMaurice, were able to exact a little revenge after a disappointing 2013 tournament where they were the three seed. That run ended in the quarterfinals with a loss to Emmaus' Kyle Jaeger and Mark Hensler, who were seeded sixth.The win sends the Bears into the PIAA State Championship Tournament that will be held May 23-24 in Hershey.