North Stars start with a bang
Opening the season against your key rival can be both a challenge as well as an opportunity.
St. Charles North took advantage of a bit of early scheduling and swept the 6 completed matches at St. Charles East. The top singles match had to be stopped late in the second set because of rain.
"When you play your rival right out of the gate, and you're playing with three freshmen and four sophomores, you don't know what you're going to get," St. Charles North coach Tim Matacio said. "Overall, we played very well."
No one seemed too thrilled about having the lone regular season match between the cross-town and Upstate Eight Conference rivals take place during the first week in April.
"It was unfortunate that we played North this early," St. Charles coach Sena Drawer said. "This is still a small community in many ways, and this is a big event for all of us. It's a shame that we had to play it now."
Then there was the weather. The rain started when most of the matches were near the midway point, and it soon became a factor.
"Rain started to have an impact at the end of the second set," St. Charles North's Andrew Davis said. "The court got pretty wet, and the ball wasn't bouncing as high."
Davis and David Johnson came out in midseason form, though it was their first match as a doubles team, and cruised to a 6-0 opening set win.
"We were ready to play, and I don't think they were as much," Johnson said. "We really wanted to be aggressive."
St. Charles East's Sam Gunther and Kirk Nelson found their rhythm in set two, but it was a little too little and the North Stars duo closed out the match, 7-6.
"Today, Kirk was frustrated with his serve, but they started playing with more energy in the second set," Drawer said.
Matt Bauman and Nikhil Mehta won the second set match over St. Charles East seniors Russ Reilly and Blake Fox, 6-3, 6-0, while the senior-freshman duo of Alex Kurian and Stephen Gow, who was coming off an injury, got by Kevin Driessen and Nick Romano, 6-4, 6-2.
The North Stars completed their clean sweep of doubles by winning one of the afternoon's most thoroughly competitive matches as Grant Johnson and Alex Anscat out-battled Colin Cordes and Brad Edwards, 6-4, 6-4.
"I saw some nice potential, and every time we play we'll get a better idea of what our weaknesses are," Drawer said. "The kids are discouraged by this, but they shouldn't be."
Over on the singles side, Christian Hoskey beat Ryan McNally, 6-1, 6-2 at No. 2, and Pat Corrigan survived a tough first set to sweep Jimmy Hebert, 7-5, 6-1, in the No. 3 match.
After St. Charles North freshman John Mittvick won the first set of the postponed No. 1 singles match, 6-1, Paul Reiff found his groove in the second set and held off defeat, though Mittvick currently leads, 6-5.
"Paul did a nice job coming back, and so the match isn't over, but we'd like to get that one," Matacio said. "East beat us last year, and we remember that."