A year ago Ashley Close sat in the bowels of Shady Side Academy after Sewickley Academy dropped a three-and-a-half-hour heartbreaker to Knoch in the WPIAL Class 2A team tennis final.
“I felt more badly that I lost my match for the seniors than I did losing it myself,” Close said. “I was hoping I could come back this year and play better.”
She did that and more.
Not only did Close win the WPIAL Class 2A singles title this year, but she also helped alleviate a little of the pain from that 2020 defeat when she ousted Knoch junior Ally Bauer, 6-4, 6-0, in the No. 1 singles match. That win helped propel the Panthers to a 4-1 victory over the Knights in the WPIAL Class 2A team final at Washington & Jefferson.
“I think the girls were really patient and really disciplined,” Sewickley Academy coach Whitney Snyder said. “They took their time, they didn’t rush and they were willing to do whatever it takes and to play long points and grind it out if necessary to win.”
Close’s match was a perfect example of that. She trailed Bauer, 4-3, in the first set and was down a break, but fought back to win the final three games of the first set and swept the second to give Sewickley Academy a much-needed point early in the match.
“It definitely feels good and I was trying not to think about last year,” Close said. “It definitely made up for last year.”
Sewickley Academy wasn’t the only school nicknamed the Panthers who avenged a 2020 final defeat in a championship rematch. Upper St. Clair took home its first title since 2003 — and its 15th in school history — with a 4-1 victory over Latrobe.
“I think I said every year, you’ve got to learn from your losses and they will build you to be tougher moving ahead the next year,” Upper St. Clair coach Renee Connors said. ”We came back when we played them in the finals last year and they just came back full-force and they proved to really fight for every point.”
Upper St. Clair got a huge lift early on when No. 1 singles player Maggie Stief made short work of Latrobe’s top player, Jenna Bell, 6-4, 6-0, in a rematch of the WPIAL Class 3A third-place singles consolation match.
Stief won that previous meeting, 6-4, 6-4, but had some into the final on the heels of a couple of losses in the team competition, including one to Peters Township’s Kat Wang in the semifinals.
“It was very important because she was kind of down after the last couple of matches because the team was winning and she wasn’t,” Connors said. “I said there’s been matches where you have won and the other team’s someone else lost and you have to realize that everybody here plays an important role … and you have to learn from losses to come back that much stronger.”
That is something Latrobe will now have to do as it prepares for its second consecutive trip through the PIAA team bracket. The competitors in both finals as well as the third-place winners, Beaver in Class 2A and Peters Township in Class 3A, will open play in the state playoffs in preliminary round matches Tuesday. The final rounds will be played Oct. 29-30 at Hershey Racquet Club in Hershey, Pa..
“I’m definitely proud of the way they played,” Latrobe coach Karissa Skiba said. “They went out there ready to play and they did, and we just want to focus on moving forward from here, take it one match at a time and refocus.”
First Published: October 21, 2021, 12:16 a.m.