Nearly a clean sweep for Neuqua at Valley meet
There wasn’t much drama in determining which team was going to win the Upstate Eight Conference Valley boys tennis tournament, but there certainly was plenty of entertainment.
Neuqua Valley won the event with 83 points, with Waubonsie Valley and Metea Valley tying for second at 47 points each. The Wildcats won first place at first, third and fourth doubles and first, second and third singles.
“Their team is so deep, what else can you say?” Waubonsie’s Mike Cioffi asked about the Wildcats. Cioffi and teammate Alex Tadeuch were the only non-Neuqua team to win a title, capturing the second-doubles championship thanks to a back-and-forth 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 win against Metea Valley’s Bill Finnerty and Nick Ohl.
“We’ve played those guys a lot the past few years,” Cioffi said. “In the first set we couldn’t get our serve returns in place and we were letting them win the match because of our mistakes. In the second set we really started to turn things around by putting balls in play.”
Cioffi and Tadeuch also did a much better job of finishing close to the net.
The duo has only played together five times season, but they are undefeated and hope it leads to good things moving toward the postseason.
“It takes time to get used to how each of us play,” Tadeuch said, “but it is one of those things that develops the more you play. We are at a point where we know what the other guy is thinking or how he might react and that has helped us. We’ve got some matches under our belt, (so) we think we can be successful at sectionals.”
The first-doubles championship match between Neuqua’s Jack Warning and Andi Kosova and Waubonsie’s Abhi Singh and Deep Chatterjee featured a first set that lasted close to 45 minutes. Warning and Kosova won the set 7-6 and 11-9 in a tiebreaker before claiming the match 7-6, 3-6 and 6-1.
Neuqua’s third-doubles team Jeff Ohmer and Amit Iyer beat Metea’s Rishi Sriram and George Lin by a 6-1, 6-3 margin, while fourth-doubles Zach Baurnfein and Colton Luburgh defeated Lake Park’s Vishal Menon and Matt Horgan 6-1, 6-2.
On the singles side Neuqua’s Tim Worley and Naveen Krishnan won second and third singles.
“Our team is really playing well right now,” said Neuqua senior Mike Baiocchi, who won first singles with a 6-1, 6-2 win against South Elgin’s Andre Norasith. “We have a lot of momentum moving forward toward the postseason.”
Baiocchi’s serve appeared to be the difference in the first-singles championship match.
“I was serving really well and moving really well,” said Baiocchi, who finished in the top 24 at state as a doubles player last season. “My serve was going pretty good and I was moving to the net real well, and overall I thought it was a very complete match.”
Norasith agreed that Baiocchi’s serve was too much to handle.
“If I could have done a better job getting a return on his serve, I think I could have been in much better shape and had a chance of winning,” Norasith said. “The key is handling serves and being able to return them, because if you can do that you can be successful. I didn’t do that today.”