It was a lean year for WPIAL at PIAA tournament
It was especially difficult year for the WPIAL at the PIAA Class 3A individual and team tennis finals at Hershey Racquet Club.
Not one championship trophy made its way westward to District7 along the turnpike.
It might appear to be a bit presumptive to believe the WPIAL should bring home at least one championship from among the best in the state. But the district has long been among the best in the classification and state titles have becomea rite of passage.
Since 1998 when the PIAA first split tennis into two classifications, the WPIAL had either a singles or doubles finalist — many times both — in the championship match every year and brought home at leastone of the two titles.
As far as the team tournament, North Allegheny and Shady Side Academy were eliminated in the semifinals. The only time before this year that the WPIAL did not have a finalist was 2005 when Lower Merion beat Upper Dublin.
That was also the only time the WPIAL did not have a semifinalist as both Latrobe and Shady Side Academy were knocked out in the quarterfinals.
This year, there was only one WPIAL finalist in Class 3A, North Allegheny senior Ashley Huang, the defending champion who was upset in the final by Neha Velaga of North Penn. Velaga, the No. 1 junior in the state, ousted the No. 2 senior and Cornell recruit,4-6, 6-2, 6-4.
“It was very exciting to be back in the state finals two years in a row,” Huang said. “I feel like it’s an accomplishment to be able to do that and I was honored to represent my school for the last two years.”
Huang was the last person standing for the WPIAL. Had she not made it into the championship match, it would have marked the first time the WPIAL did not have a finalist in either the singles or doubles
finals in either classification since 1996. That was also the year freshman Alice Sukner of Allderdice made it to the championship match.
Next year, Huang will also be one of two Tigers competing in the Ivy League. Her former teammate, Anna Li, is a sophomore at Harvard and there is a possibility the two will play each other at somepoint.
“I’ll definitely go up to her and give her a big hug,” Huang said. “It’s going to be interesting to play her because we were teammates and I think it’s going to be a fun match.”
Class 2A
There might not have been a crazier draw in the PIAA than the one in Class 2A.
Every two years the PIAA presets its bracket according to district finish and doesn’t use available USTA rankings to seed it. Usually there will be a strange meeting or two in the early rounds — last year in Class 3A when No. 1 freshman Ava Catanzarite of North Allegheny and No. 1 junior Eliza Askarova of George Washington could have easily been a championship match but instead wasa first-round, three-set battle — but this year things were stranger than usual.
In both singles and doubles there were rematches ofthe 2017 state championship matches. In singles, Knoch sophomore Laura Greb faced off with Bethlehem Catholic senior Brenna Maglichetti, while Beaver’s Devyn Campbell and new partner Anna Blum saw Villa Maria Academy’s Sarah DeMarco and Tara Thomas.
“There were a lot of nerves going into it,” Greb said. “I knew how she played from the previous year and I had to step up my game to try to defeat her.”
Greb lost 6-3, 7-5 against Maglichetti and Villa Maria Academy’s twosome knocked out Campbell and Blum, 6-2, 6-0. Both also lost in the third place consolation match.
Historically speaking, the WPIAL had the most improbable state champion.In the first 18 years of theteam finals, the district only had six previous finalists and just one PIAA winner, Sewickley Academ yin 2011.
This year the Panthers didit again.
Sewickley Academy battled to a pair of 3-2 victories, against Lower Moreland in the semifinals and Wyomissing in the finals, towin for the second time.