Tennis: Kearsarge boys win semifinal, sets up 3rd straight final vs. Plymouth

The Cougars defeated a familiar opponent on Tuesday. On Thursday, they’ll play another familiar foe for the championship.

No. 2 Kearsarge (15-1) defeated No. 3 St. Thomas, 7-2, the Cougars third win over the Saints (13-3) this season, to set up a rematch against No. 1 Plymouth (16-0) in the NHIAA Division III boys’ tennis championship at Concord’s Memorial Field.

This is the third consecutive meeting between Kearsarge and the Bobcats in the D-III final. Plymouth won the 2022 title, its first in program history, with a 6-3 victory, while Kearsarge capped last year’s undefeated season with a 5-4 win in the championship.

Thursday’s match will also be Kearsarge’s fourth straight finals appearance. The Cougars defeated Trinity, 6-2, in 2021.

Junior Liam Miller showed a lot of mental toughness in his No. 2 singles match. Miller trailed early and didn’t play his best, but came back to win 9-8.

“Liam was not playing his best, his service and drives were inconsistent,” Kearsarge’s ninth-year head coach Lynn Miller said. “But he made some strategic adjustments and won it in the tiebreaker.”

Sophomore Eli Whipple (8-1 at No. 3), senior Thomas Shepherd (8-1 at No. 4), sophomore Billy Reid (8-4 at No. 5) and first-year senior Andrew Zielinski (8-4 at No. 6) swept the remaining singles matches to give Kearsarge a 5-1 lead heading into doubles.

Whipple and Shepherd won 8-3 at No. 2 doubles, and Reid and sophomore Andrew Huff won their No. 3 doubles match 8-0 to close out the 7-2 victory.

When the Cougars win two out of three doubles matches, they’ve typically won their tightest matches, but hitting that magic number isn’t all that coach Miller wants her team to focus on heading into Thursday’s championship.

While Kearsarge defeated St. Thomas twice in the regular season (5-4 on April 1 and 7-2 on May 1), the Cougars suffered their only loss of the season on May 4 at Plymouth when the Bobcats won 6-3.

“For certain, we’re going to have to play a lot better than we did against them (earlier),” coach Miller said. “We were really sloppy. We need to do the simple things better and be more mentally tough than we were. Plymouth comes at you, they’ll come to the net, they’ll poach more than other teams we get.”

“Our goal is to try to split singles. We’ll have to play better at doubles,” Miller added. “(Plymouth) just outplayed us a little bit. The guys know that we have a shot to beat them, but we have to play better.”