Sewickley wraps up a perfect season
Tri-State Sports & News Service
If there is such a thing as a perfect season in boys tennis, Sewickley Academy may have accomplished it.
For the 14th consecutive year and 22nd time overall the Panthers won the WPIAL Class 2A team title. In addition, senior Luke Ross took home the WPIAL singles title, while seniors Neil Rana and Ryan Gex captured the doubles title.
Most teams would be satisfied with that, but Sewickley Academy took it one step further. The Panthers repeated as state team champions, Ross became the first WPIAL tennis player in 54 years to win back-to-back state singles titles, while Rana and Gex were the first pair ever to even play in the Class 2A doubles final and also came away with the PIAA title.
“I don’t ever want to say I favor one team over another, but I think the results speak for themselves,” Sewickley Academy coach Whitney Snyder said. “They want to bring additional pride to the program and the tradition of the school and that’s the mentality.”
Pulling off a clean sweep like this isn’t something that happens every day. Since the PIAA first recognized team tennis as a sport in 1999, only two other schools, Harriton in 2004 and Lower Moreland in 2008, have ever pulled off a sweep of all three in the same year.
Maybe even more impressive was that Sewickley Academy won the WPIAL and PIAA titles without losing an individual match in either tournament, something theother two cannot boast.
Sewickley Academy finished the regular season undefeated despite playing matches against some of the top Class 3A schools in the area. The Panthers registered wins against Fox Chapel and Peters Township, the WPIAL champion and runner-up, along with Mt. Lebanon and Shady Side Academy.
What may be even more impressive was, in their 23 wins, the Panthers only lost four individual matches, two each against Peters Township and Mt. Lebanon. That means the three singles and two doubles tandems, independent of the actual WPIAL and PIAA singles and doubles tournaments, won 111 out of 115 individual matches for a winning percentage of .965.
With the wins by Ross in singles and Gex and Rana in doubles along with a thirdplace finish in doubles by freshman Arjan Bedi and junior Nishant Purewall as well as a quarterfinal appearance by senior Sam Sauter in singles, the Panthers won 25 of their 29 individual matches (.862) in the WPIAL and PIAA playoffs.
“I think that the singles and the doubles tournament is really an extension of the team tournament for the boys and I think they look at it as they’re playing for the school more than they’re playing for themselves,” Snyder said. “We took six kids up to states and they’re in the same van so it’s not really much different than if you were taking the kids to an away match.”
About the only question that remains is where Sewickley Academy goes from here. This is a Panthers team that will lose five of its top nine players including a three-time WPIAL and two time PIAA champion in Ross, a 2015 singles finalist and three-time state qualifier in Sauter as well as Gex, the team’s No. 3 singles player who became the first person in either classification ever to win four WPIAL doubles titles.
“I think that the other kids that are on the junior varsity and, potentially, the kids that are going to be in ninth grade know about the success and hopefully will be self-motivated to say, ‘Now it’s my turn,’” Snyder said. “Every year it’s different and it’s exciting to build a team.”