MANCHESTER – A championship rematch of last year’s final became a possibility as soon as the draw came out and Bishop Brady’s Sydney Herrington and Manchester Central’s Julia Chappell appeared in opposite brackets.
“I tried not to think about that, but it couldn’t help but slip into my mind,” Herrington said. “I definitely wanted to get her back because she won last year, so I was pretty excited to see her in the finals and I really wanted to win.”
Which is exactly what she did. After coughing away a big lead and dropping the first set, No. 3 Herrington showed unparalleled mental toughness to complement her powerful all-court game and claim the girls’ singles championship by beating No. 2 Chappell, 6-7 (5-7), 6-0, 10-5 (a 10-point tiebreaker is used in place of a third set)
Herrington is the first-ever girls’ singles champion from Brady and the first Green Giant to win a singles title since John Bunker in 1967.
“It’s a big positive for the program that a small school with a small student population can still produce competitive athletes at (this) level,” said Lee Herrington, Bishop Brady’s tennis coach and Sydney’s father.
“It’s definitely lots of joy, and there’s some relief. I was a little scared in the tiebreaker, but I tried to show like I wasn’t nervous,” Sydney said. “I’m just really excited right now.”
Herrington did an excellent job masking her nerves in the championship-deciding tiebreaker. She banged in an unreturnable serve on the first point, won the next with a pretty drop shot and stalked around the court with confidence as she took a 4-1 lead.
However, like she did in the first set, the tenacious Chappell came back in the tiebreaker and made it 4-4. But Herrington would never surrender the lead. She won the next three points by outlasting Chappell in some of the matches longest rallies, double faulted to make it 7-5, and then reeled off the last three points in impressive fashion.
Herrington hit a great lob to go up 8-5 and then won back-to-back points of marathon rallies that may have been the two best points in the match.
“Oh my gosh,” Herrington said when asked about those final two points. “The wind finally started dying down and both of us got a lot more confident. I just tried to stay consistent.”
Trying to stay consistent in the wind and in the pressure of the finals was the key to the entire match for both players.
“I saw a lot of nerves from two high school kids trying to play for the elite championship,” Central Coach Dave Wheeler said. “Think about these two kids and the time they put in, the investment they make, the investment their families make. They have a lot riding on it and this is it, this is the pinnacle.”
Herrington appeared ready to claim that pinnacle from the start of the finals. She was striking the ball cleanly and with power off both sides and getting to the net with regularity to take a 5-2 lead. But then Chappell broke Herrington after a long deuce game, held quickly, broke Herrington again to tie things at 5-5 and, eventually forced a tiebreak and completed a shocking comeback to win the first set.
“I was trying to target her backhand and then I was trying to come in, and that worked, but when I was up I relaxed a little bit,” Herrington said. “I didn’t really do a good job at the end.”
But after that is when Herrington turned to what may be the strongest part of her game, that mental toughness.
“Before the second set I just had to flush the first set. I couldn’t think about that and how I was up and I almost won but I lost,” Herrington said. “So I just tried to target her backhand again and come in more often and get my serve percentage up because I was hitting a ton of double faults.”
She did all of those things to perfection as she rolled to a 6-0 second set win to set the stage for the super tiebreaker. She also got some solid advice from her coach/dad before that tiebreaker.
“He told me to have fun,” Herrington said, “and play to win.”
Because of the wind and her opponent, Herrington had to be a little more cautious in her semifinal win against Pinkerton Academy’s Sam Barros, the top seed.
“I couldn’t try to kill the ball or hit winners against (Barros), I had to just hit it back and make sure I wasn’t making mistakes,” Herrington said. “I didn’t really know a lot about her because I hand’t played her before, so I tried to figure her out in warmups and I also tried to target her backhand. And she hits slice and I knew I could match up slice and slice and I could win the battle there.”
Not only did Herrington figure out a solid game plan, she stuck with it as she cruised to a 6-3, 6-2 win over Barros. The other semifinal saw Chappell beat unseeded Sage Winter of Portsmouth, 6-2, 6-1.