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Julia Eilert

On Saturday May 7, the McPherson High School’s boys tennis team pushed and fought to get yet at Regionals another win under their belt for next week’s State Tournament in Topeka, Kansas. With qualifying all six boys at home, Jarrod Nowak and Andrew Snell in singles and Kento Aizawa-Nolan Schrader and Hadley Hageman-Kaden Stewart in doubles will be continuing their season in Topeka next weekend.

In the doubles championship match, Aizawa and Schrader came back from being down 5-1 in the first set against the fifth-place state finishers from last year, Trapper Bellah and Nick Reinert. The doubles duo flipped a switch and pushed to win four matches in a row to come back and tie the game 5-5 and go into a tiebreaker to win 6-5 in the first set. The team used their enthusiasm to win the second set 6-2 for the first place medal.

Hageman and Stewart also received some wins for the team placing third against a revival Buhler team, Hank Goertzen and Hunter Wiehl, 6-4, 6-4. The team of Hageman-Stewart were down 4-3 in the second set and worked to win the final three games.

In the singles championships, Nowak and Snell took a rough turn in semi-finals playing each other. No. 1 seed Nowak took on McPherson’s own Snell winning the first set and Snell pulling through and winning the second set. Nowak wound up fighting through to win the second place medal against Abilene’s twice-beaten Jacob Berven. While Snell finished off Abilene’s Ryan LaCombe 6-1,6-1 for third place.

The team of six will need to power through the state tournament to overpower strong hold Wichita Collegiate, a team who has recently been rearranging their line-up to throw off teams like McPherson.