After school last Monday, October 25th, 2010, the Mayo girl’s tennis team all boarded a bus headed to the Twin Cities for the Minnesota State Girls Tennis Tournament. Amazingly this is the 14th consecutive year that the team has been able to compete in the state meet. During an interview with senior captain Jessie Edwards she said, “Coming into the State tournament this year we had very high expectations and realized that we will have to bring our A game if we want to achieve all our goals.”
The Spartans first team match was against Brainerd. Brainerd was an easy opponent for the Spartans, hence the 7-0 victory. The team enjoyed their modest win and prepared for a tough match the following day against Mounds View High School in the semi finals. Mayo had played the Mounds View Mustangs earlier in the season and had played great, but unfortunately the Mustang’s strong individual players clenched the victory for them, so the Spartans lost 3-4. When the Spartans walked on the court for the semi final match they were immediately welcomed by over 50 howling Mayo High school students who all took a fan bus up so that they could support their girl’s tennis team in their aspirations for a state championship title. The cheering Spartan fans quieted down as the head coach from each team announced the line for the day. The line ups hinted that the Spartans had the advantage in all the doubles matches while the Mustangs had the upper hand in the singles matches. As the line ups had predicted, the Spartans won all three doubles matches while the Mustangs won all four singles matches, thus ending with a Mustangs victory. Sadly the Spartans goal of being the Minnesota Girls State Tennis Champions was crushed.
Some of the Spartans were feeling disappointed, but they had a chance to redeem themselves in the third place match against Minnetonka. The third place match went well as Mayo beat Minnetonka 5-2, winning third place in the Minnesota State Girls Tennis Tournament. According the senior captain Hannah Stroebel, “Minnetonka’s doubles were surprisingly better than Mounds View’s double[s] so we only won two of the three matches[.] [B]ut we won all but one of the singles matches so we are very happy. I really enjoyed my senior year season as a whole and am happy about how it ended.”
Some of the Spartans also competed in the doubles tournament. One of the doubles teams from Mayo, Jessie Edwards and Kylie Boyer, took third place in the tournament. Jessie Edwards talked about the doubles tournament. “My partner and I played very well during this tournament and most importantly had a lot of fun while doing it. We had some very close matches and in the quarterfinals match we played 3 sets that took about one hour each. For our third place game we played the other doubles team from Mayo. This made it tough to play them but we overcame that and won the match.”
The Spartans didn’t come out of the state tournament as champions as they had hoped, but they won third place in the tournament which is something to be very, very proud of.
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