Syosset girls breeze to third straight Long Island large school tennis title
Skyler Lin, an eighth grader, helped Syosset sweep the singles courts with a 6-0, 6-0 win on second singles on Saturday. Credit: Kelvin Loarca
The conditions weren’t ideal, but for the Syosset girls tennis team, it didn’t matter.
Syosset (20-1) fought through wind gusts reaching 20 miles per hour to earn its third consecutive Long Island large school championship. The team defeated Suffolk County champion Half Hollow Hills East, 6-1, on Saturday at Cold Spring Harbor.
It was first doubles pair Tiffany Cai and Selena Wang who clinched the title with three matches to go in a 6-2, 6-2 bout against Half Hollow Hills East pair Samantha Heyman and Emma Wilck. A seventh-grader, Cai may be small in stature, but her presence on the court is massive.
“It’s my first year on the team, so I feel honored to be in the clinching match,” Cai said. “Both [Heyman and Wilck] were really good at the baseline and could hit really hard, but we just blocked out the noise and played our best.”
Wang, a freshman, said when playing on such a talented team, the on-court chemistry comes naturally.
“We’re so connected as a team that any of us could pair up and play well together,” Wang said.
With a large underclassman presence including some athletes pulled up from the middle school, coach Shai Fisher said his team’s youth is one of the things that makes Syosset so successful.
“The [underclassmen] add to the team in a lot of different ways,” Fisher said. “They bring so much personality and a different kind of energy because this is still very new to them. They get so excited and it gets everybody pumped up.”
Eighth-grader Skyler Lin helped to complete Syosset’s 3-0 sweep on the singles side, winning the second singles match, 6-0, 6-0, over Half Hollow Hills East senior Kate Holland. Stephanie Marcheret defeated Ashley Pursoo, 6-3, 6-4, in first singles while Hannah Wang defeated Myrah Galhotra, 6-0, 6-0, in third singles.
Lin said the weather forced her to make some adjustments to her play.
“On one side I had to push my serve harder because the wind was against me, and on the other side I had to pull back a little,” Lin said. “It made it difficult to return too because the ball may look like it was coming toward me, but then the wind would make it drop.”
Another first-year member of the team, Lin said she is confident that the singles squad has the foundation to take Syosset far into the state tournament.
“It was really important for us to win in singles because the doubles teams are seeing a lot of tighter matchups,” Lin said. “If we could take all three of those matches, it only takes one doubles win to clinch.”
Syosset will next advance to the state semifinal round on Friday at the USTA National Tennis Center in Queens. Half Hollow Hills East finished its season 18-1.
