Queen Anne’s County High’s No. 3 girls doubles team of Sydney Pinder and Kara Ringold were down 4-1 when head coach Dee Fisher approached.
“I asked them, ‘Hey, are you guys having fun?’” Fisher said. “And they were like, ‘No. We’re not.’ I was like, ‘You guys need to go out there and have fun and relax.’ Just the things you can say to kids, and nothing tennis related, and it just made them relax.”
Pinder and Ringold rallied to win, then watched Hayden Legg rally for a clinching victory at No. 3 singles Tuesday, May 7, helping Queen Anne’s defeat Stephen Decatur, 4-3, at Washington College for its first Bayside Conference championship in girls tennis.
While the Lions were winning their first title, North Caroline’s boys were winning a second straight conference crown, topping James M. Bennett, 4-3, to cap a perfect 15-0 season.
“We lost one match last season,” Bulldogs second-year boys head coach James Donelan said. “It was their goal to go undefeated this year. And we were able to do that, which was huge.
We had a couple of close matches at the end of the season that just took some real grit to pull out and some real mental toughness from our boys,” Donelan said of a 4-3 win at St. Michaels on April 24 and a 4-3 victory over Easton in the regular-season finale May 1. “It was really impressive to watch. Their growth and their ability to face adversity, face everybody coming at you, giving you their best every single night and just finding a way to win.”
The Bulldogs did that again against the South champion Clippers.
North Caroline’s No. 1 singles team of Josh Huster and Jesse Link defeated Cypress Schnatterly and Joe Chen, 9-7, while Ryan Canter and Hayden Kent beat Bennett’s Daniel Ryu and Mason Layne, 8-4, in second doubles. But the Clippers avoided a double sweep, when Shafay Qaiser and Rishi Kandagatla earned an 8-5 win over Gavin O’Brien and Yossin Roblero-Velasquez at No. 3.
It remained close, as Bennett’s Chen defeated Link, 8-5, at second singles, and Ryu outlasted Canter, 9-7 at No. 3. But Roblero-Velasquez rolled to an 8-1 victory over Landon Blumenthal at No. 4. Huster, who last year teamed with Rebecca White to win the Class 2A state mixed doubles title — North Caroline’s first-ever state tennis title of any kind — clinched the victory against Bennett and the perfect record with an 8-3 victory over Schnatterly at No. 1.
“Going into this season, after the success that we had last year, we were definitely very confident,” Donelan said. “We knew it wasn’t going to be handed to us. We knew that everybody was going to be putting a target on our back, and that they knew we only graduated one senior and then all these boys were returning.”
Unlike Donelan, Fisher entered the season thinking rebuild after graduating nine seniors from a year ago. Instead, the Lions went unbeaten in the North and 13-1 overall, with the lone loss coming against Decatur.
And while Queen Anne’s drew a rematch with the Seahawks for the Bayside championship, Fisher didn’t want his team deviating from its usual approach.
“Just treat it like a regular match and have fun,” Fisher said to his team.
The Lions’ No. 1 doubles team of Lucy Taylor and younger sister Meg Taylor lost 8-6 to Decatur’s Ana Pena and Emily Ferguson. But Queen Anne’s Hayden Legg and Marylee Kline beat Brooke Berquist and Kalli Nordstrom, 8-2, at No. 2, while Pinder and Ringold erased their 4-1 deficit en route to an 8-6 victory over Anika Karl and Emmie Weber at No. 3.
The Seahawks moved to a 3-2 lead, when Pena defeated Lucy Taylor, 8-2 at first singles, and Ferguson earned an 8-2 win over Meg Taylor at No. 2. Kline tied the match at 3-3 with her 8-6 win over Nordstrom at No. 4.
That left No. 3 singles, where Karl built a 4-1 lead on Legg. Again Fisher spoke with his player.
“I was like, ‘Come on Hayden. You can play better,’” Fisher said. “’Focus. Take your time.’ And basically she just started turning it around.”
Legg did turn it around, rallying for an 8-6 title-clinching victory.
“I was like, ‘It’s going to be tough,’” Fisher said. “She’s like the most chill person. She just kept coming back and coming back.”
Yet after Legg had completed her comeback to seal the title, nobody from Queen Anne’s stormed the court or hoisted their teammate onto their shoulders for a victory lap.
“Nobody got excited,” Fisher said. “We just all like took it all in, like, ‘Good job Hayden.’” Fisher said. “I think that’s just the mentality of our team. We treat it like a regular match. We just do what we do.
“It felt even better because we lost to Decatur during the regular season,” Fisher said. “Hey we fixed our wrongs, made some corrections and won it.”
What Fisher wasn’t expecting came next.
“They were like, ‘Come here coach Fisher and take a picture,’” Fisher said. “And then they started spraying me with silly string. It was fun.”
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