The tennis mega facility contains 16 courts. Eight on one side. Eight on the other. Westfield played its semifinal matches on one side. Summit on the other. Meet in the middle. A kind of poetic symmetry.
Perhaps inevitably, the two powerhouses collided. All five flight finals featured a Summit-Westfield faceoff. Two days and dozens of matches into this Union County Tournament, the thing basically became a typical after-school match.
Five matches. Win three or more matches, win the tournament. That simple.
So Westfield ripped off three quick victories and won the tournament. The Blue Devils won every flight except for first singles to capture their second consecutive UCT on Thursday at the Donald Van Blake Tennis Facility in Plainfield.
But a hint of uncertainty briefly arose.
Westfield’s path to victory ran through second singles, first singles and second doubles. The Blue Devils expected to win those three matches, had charted a route to the trophy with stops at those three landmarks and perhaps one more.
Part 1? Check. Tristan Wroe throttled his opponent at second singles from the outset to win, 6-0, 6-1.
Parts 2 and 3 seemed equally breezy, at least initially. Westfield’s first and second doubles squads glided to first-set victories. Then second doubles dropped its second set. Then first doubles lagged behind in its second set, 1-4.
Westfield head coach George Kapner, of course, grew concerned.
“The worry creeps in as soon as they’re not playing as well as they’re capable of,” he said, “because you don’t know where it’s gonna go or whether it’s gonna come back.”
Ask the players, though, and they’ll deny any fear.
“We were never worried,” said Cole Hornbeck, a first doubles player. “It’s kind of arrogant, but we just kind of knew we were gonna win. We just kind of had to decide to win.”
“Honestly, there wasn’t,” said Colin Cimei, a second doubles player. “It’s not them winning, it’s us losing, so as long as we just fix our own game, we’re positive we’re gonna win.”
Something else happened, too. Something that flipped the matches. Something besides the players’ apparently unshakable belief in their superiority.
Cimei changed socks.
The tournament-altering footwear adjustment arrived in the recess after the second set. A hole gaped in the big toe of Cimei’s sock. So he changed it. “That was huge,” he said.
Cimei and Deven Patel suffocated their Summit opponents in the third set to win, 6-1, 3-6, 6-1. Hornbeck and Eshaan Khera roared back from down 1-4 to reel off five games in a row and win, 6-2, 6-4.
“We just kind of know we’re better than them,” Hornbeck said.
Everyone else knew it, too. If they hadn’t known it, they learned it. Khera ripped a forehand winner down the line for 5-4, and then Westfield held serve at love to win the match. Hornbeck pounced on a lobbed return to punctuate the victory.
The wins at second doubles clinched the team tournament title.
It would not have, though, if not for Ben Duan’s stirring earlier semifinal win at first singles. Duan, seeded No. 3, faced Union Catholic’s Shaan Trehan, seeded No. 2. Duan had, earlier this season, lost to Trehan in straight sets. Their semifinal match evolved into the match of the day.
Trehan took the first set. Duan seized the second set. Up came a third set.
It was a set of perpetual motion. Trehan sometimes looked exhausted, pacing in uncertain half-circles between points, long arms sort of dragging (he eventually withdrew from his third-place match). He still buried shots into corners. Just not frequently enough.
One moment exemplified the match.
Duan ripped a forehand winner. Except it wasn’t a forehand winner. Trehan had raised a finger, the universal “out” signal. The ref, who had watched on apathetically all afternoon, arms crossed, eyes drifting, raised a finger in agreement. Duan stared for a moment.
But only for a moment. He resumed playing. Orchestrated a masterful ensuing point with a dizzying array of shots to save a break point. The point ended with a thumped forehand winner. Duan won the next point. Then the next to win the game. Then the next four games to win the match, 4-6, 6-4, 6-1.
It was a marathon match. Three hours. The first finals matches revved up as Duan and Trehan left the court. Duan’s win was crucial.
“It took all the pressure off” the other Westfield players, Kapner said. “Because they knew that, had he lost, we would have had to win four out of five matches this afternoon.”
Westfield won four out of five finals, anyway.
Zander Ainge, at third singles, provided the fourth victory. Scenes of total exhaustion littered the match. Ben Levkov, Ainge’s opponent, lay on his back, hands on his head, during a changover. Ainge sank to his knees after especially long points, pushing himself to his feet with his racket, a weary man with a cane.
Ainge prevailed, though, 6-4, 0-6, 6-3, avenging last week’s galling, infuriating loss to Levkov. Ainge confessed feeling bereft of confidence after the loss last Friday. He seemed completely in command closing out the final few games Thursday.
Much of the attention gravitated, of course, toward the first singles final. Duan returned from an hour’s rest to face Jonah Ng, the top seed. Ng had dismantled Plainfield’s industrious Isaiah Dore in the semifinals, deploying his varied arsenal of shots to march to a quick victory.
Ng entered the final having rested for three hours. Duan rested for one. That shouldn’t have mattered, Duan said.
“I was really tired, so I guess it could’ve,” he said later. “But I don’t think it should have done that much to make me lose this bad.”
He lost rapidly. Ng worked his unparalleled magic for a 6-0, 6-1 victory. He pounded shots from the baseline, floated nifty drop shots, pinpointed the gaps in Duan’s defense.
“Just from the beginning, I played aggressive,” Ng said. “Stayed consistent. I think I was very consistent today. Didn’t miss a lot of balls.”
Ng also beat Duan last Friday, outlasting him in three sets. Duan’s aggression had yielded a first-set victory and an early lead in the second, but a calf tweak and an Ng resurgence had denied Duan a marquee victory.
Duan entered the UCT on Wednesday having rested since sustaining that injury. The calf tweak grew into a significant complication, forcing an extended rest period. When Duan returned Wednesday, “he was very rusty,” Kapner said. He fell behind in his quarterfinal match Wednesday, 1-5, but rallied to win the set in a tiebreak and then the match.
Even with the rust and the long matches, Duan reached the final. Kapner said he was “super proud” of that.
A despondent Duan viewed the loss differently.
“I don’t really want to admit it,” Duan said, “but I think I mentally gave up after the first set, and I kind of just let everything fall apart.”
“I think every part of my game needs to improve,” he added. “The match I just played shows it doesn’t matter what you did before, what matters is how you did in the match you just played. I guess I just have to get better at everything.”
Duan finished second in Union County. As a sophomore. And that was his takeaway.
Heady days, indeed.
