After three-week hiatus, teams gear up for run at PIAA title

Tri-State Sports & News Service

A year ago, North Allegheny went into the PIAA Class 3A tournament as a three-time defending state champion.

By the weekend at Hershey Racquet Club, the Tigers were a four-time finalist, but couldn’t close the deal as they were knocked off by Harriton in a 3-2 heartbreaker.

It was the first time a WPIAL team failed to win a state title in the highest classification since 2005. It was also the first time the WPIAL had held its team championships three weeks before the beginning of the PIAA tournament.

“You learn that every single experience in the postseason is different and you learn every single match about the girls, their temperament and your temperament,” North Allegheny coach Michelle Weniger said. “A loss is sad and it’s unfortunate and you wish you didn’t have them, but I think as a coach I’m preparing the girls a lot better and we’ll just keep playing and keep grinding.”

In previous years, the WPIAL had slotted its singles and doubles tournaments to be played during the early part of the season and the team playoffs would be held the week before the state finals were set to begin. Last year was the first time the WPIAL had switched to its new format where the team finals were played before the singles and doubles championships.

North Allegheny will get a second crack at dealing with this problem when it heads into the state tournament Tuesday against the District 10 champion.

“Thinking about it because there’s really nothing I can do about it because it’s the schedule and you have to accept it, it has so much to do with the girls and the chemistry of the girls,” Weniger said. “We may be separated for a few weeks, but they do not take a racket out of their hands. They get on the court every single day and, what I’m confident about this team is that, once this team gets back together, I don’t think it will take long for us to gel again.”

North Allegheny had one benefit that it didn’t have last year as it placed its top two singles players, Ava Catanzarite and Ashley Huang, into the WPIAL Class 3A semifinals and both qualified for the state finals. This means the doubles teams had an opportunity to play in the sectionals and WPIAL championships this week and will be reasonably fresh when they take the court for the team tournament.

“I wish that we didn’t have to do it,” Weniger said. “But I know that we do and I think I have the group of girls that, when we get together, we won’t have missed a beat,”

Sewickley Academy

Sewickley Academy won its first WPIAL Class 2A team title since 2014 this year, but that doesn’t mean the Panthers haven’t been through the state tournament before.

Last year, the team got its first taste of the new format and,as the third-place finisher from the WPIAL, pulled District 10 champion Villa Maria Academy and was drummed out in a 5-0 decision in the preliminaryround.

This year, Sewickley Academy will take on District 9 champion (Brockway/Elk County Catholic) on Tuesday at a site and time to be determined.

And, like North Allegheny, the Panthers are finding the format change to be a challenge.

“You have to keep these kids in competition because life comes up and their teenage years come up,” Sewickley Academy coach Whitney Snyder said. “You can’t turn a light switch on in practice and say, ‘OK, do this,’ so you have to keep yourself sharp. I’m just trying to keep them in competition.”

Sewickley Academy opted to play its No. 2 and No. 3 singles players, Simran Vedi and Christine Walton, in the Section 4 singles tournament and its two doubles tandems, Lydia Elste and Alina Mattson and Victoria Keller and Olivia McLeod, in the tournament in an effort to maintain continuity.

Still, that doesn’t mean the change has gone over well, even for a coach who worked through it and led the Panthers’ boys tennis team to a state title in the spring. For the most part, the teams have already peaked three weeks earlier in the WPIAL tournament and have to get back to that summit after a threeweekhiatus.

“The girls played well and I’m proud they won the WPIAL championship, but now you’re constantly thinking about how do you keep their attention span because in practice they’re just not as attentive as they are in team competition,” Snyder said. “All this individual stuff is practice for the team tournament.”