Blazer boys tennis triumphs over Paint Branch

The blazing boys tennis team smoked their Paint Branch rivals today, letting go of only 13 games to seize the meet, 7-0. The next home game will be against Springbrook on Apr 26.

Dominating the court today was senior co-captain James Phillips. Phillips' sure-fire combination of low-riding, power-packed topspin forehands, along with his confident netgame sealed the Blazer's 6-0, 6-1 victory from the start.

Phillips cited his opponent's errors as the overriding factor contributing to Phillip's win. "We didn't have anything more than a three-ball rally because [my opponent] would always mess up," he said. "He hit everything into the net."

On singles court one, number one player sophomore Michael Price's whizzing ground strokes and consecutive aces earned him an equally satisfying 6-1, 6-0 victory.

Price also commented on the poor performance of his opponent and added that he had trouble "getting into the match" because of his opponent's unpredictable nature on the court.

But coach David Ngbea believes that Price's difficulties lie in his own mistakes rather than his opponent's inconsistency. Ngbea cited Price's serve toss as one area in need of improvement. "[Price] isn't serving well because of his toss," he commented. "The toss is too low so it prevents him from reaching up which would make you catch the ball at the apex. If he keeps hitting the ball straight on, [the ball] will go straight and by the time it hits the court, it will be out."

In the doubles arena, freshman Edward Halabi's masterful overheads and whizzing volleys sparked the first applause this season from an awed crowd while partner junior Lella Alemu's sizzling serves produced several aces to leave the duo with an applaudable 6-0, 6-2 victory on doubles court one.

Although the pair gave up a mere two games, Ngbea said that the cause of the losses, too many balls going out, could have been easily avoided. "Every point [Halabi and Alemu] lost was because they were over swinging," he said. "We're just beating ourselves. We just need to place the ball and use our brains. For some reason, they want to just hit hard hard hard. That's just bad tennis."

But over slamming was the only problem next door on doubles court two. Junior Ji-Heon Kim smacked down four consecutive overheads with such force that the balls flew over the fence after they landed inside the lines on the first bounce. Partner sophomore Kevin Chai balanced out Kim's power, hitting smooth ground strokes that proved to be equally effective in seizing the match 6-2, 6-0.

Kim noted that his opponent's poor placement skills in addition to the absence of errors on his side of the court guaranteed a Blazer victory. "[My opponents] just hit the ball to us instead of cross-court, so we had easy volleys and overheads," he said. "We were just consistent overall; we didn't hit balls out much or double fault."