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MHS duo reach state doubles final

By Justin Feil, Assistant Sports Editor
It was one of the toughest days when Montgomery High School’s Zach Anderson and Nikil Pancha last met Earl Hsieh and Jessie Korovin on the courts.
The Livingston first doubles team knocked off the Cougars on their way to a win that ended Montgomery’s run in the team state tournament. Anderson and Pancha this time ended the Livingston pair’s season on their way to the state doubles tournament finals.
“We followed the same mentality of just being aggressive and trying to come to net and finish the points, but we definitely executed better,” said Pancha after the 5-7, 6-3, 6-2 win Wednesday at Mercer County Park. “The first set, we got off to a relatively slow start, but we picked it up in the second and third sets.”
The win enabled the MHS seniors to reach the championship match against Newark Academy, a 6-0, 6-0 winner over Millburn in a match scheduled for Thursday.
“It means everything to us,” Anderson said. “I’ve dreamed about this moment since freshman year. It’s a really big match for us (Thursday).”
The match could help the two make history for MHS. No school has swept the girls and boys state doubles tennis tournaments. Last fall, Emily Roeper and Kim Szakats won the girls tournament for the Cougars girls program.
“We feel like we can sweep the doubles this year and have the best doubles teams in the state,” Anderson said. “I play mixed doubles with Emily Roeper. It’d be awesome. Not just for us, but for Montgomery to show how strong its program is. It’s grown a lot in the past couple years.”
A title win would be quite a send-off for the seniors, both who are aiming to play in college, Pancha at Case Western and Anderson at Alleghany University.
“In the beginning of the season, I knew we’d be pretty good,” Anderson said. “You never expect to get here, but we definitely knew it was a possibility. We just worked hard all season and now we’re here.”
The area saw three players reach the fourth round of the state singles tournament. Kabir Sarita of West Windsor-Plainsboro South lost to Tyler Schick of Millburn, Robert Siniakowicz of WW-P Souuth lost to defending champion Maverick Lin of Highland Park and Montgomery’s Vishu Joshi fell to East Brunswick’s Josh Marchalik. Ben Eckardt of MHS lost in the third round to Holmdel’s Michael Chen.
In the doubles tournament, Princeton High School’s Andrew Lin and Andrew Wei fell to Livington in the third round. WW-P North’s Arjun Krishnan and Louis Wang fell to Shawnee in the second round.
While Pancha played in the singles lineup last year for the Cougars, Anderson began last year at first doubles, but dropped to second doubles when he had to find a new partner midway through the season. That switch cost him a shot at qualifying for the state doubles tournament, but it made him hungrier to succeed this year.
“This is actually my first chance,” Anderson said. “It’s my only chance.”
Pancha also has enjoyed the run to the finals.
“It’s great,” he said. “It’s both of our first years in the tournament, and we’re both seniors, so this is our last year of high school tennis so we really want to make it count.”
The season began with them finding each other paired together, two seniors with years of tennis experience, but not many matches together. From there, they won overwhelmingly throughout the season, falling only to Hillsborough in the regular season and to Livingston in the Group IV team tournament semifinals.
“We knew we were a pretty solid doubles team,” Pancha said. “We thought we could do pretty well in the state tournament, but I don’t think we expected to get to the finals going into it. It was more of something we were aiming for but we didn’t know how we compared to the North Jersey teams.”
The two came into the doubles tournament playing well, and they have raised their level of play with every challenge. They were a straight sets winner in the quarterfinals over Summit before taking out Livingston, which was top-seeded.
“I think today was probably the best I’ve played in the high school season, and the same with my partner,” Pancha said. “Through the tournament, it’s been nice getting matches in every day. It’s like the season, but we had a break so we could work on things that we knew we had to work on. And now we’re going at it with 100 percent.”
Montgomery came into the tournament seeded fourth. They lived up to those expectations and more by making the finals.
“We’ve had big matches before with the team and team states, and we feel confident in what we can do,” Anderson said. “We have the mentality if we play our game that we’re just as good if not better than everybody. We take that mentality to the court every time we play.”
Their confidence was not swayed by their earlier loss to Livingston. If anything it helped Pancha and Anderson.
“I think it gave us a little more confidence,” Pancha said. “We knew we could win it. We were up, 6-1, in the super tiebreaker and we fell apart. It was a tough loss, but we knew we’d have to play very well and we could return their serve and get into the point. It was just a matter of winning the point after we got into the point.”
Anderson added: “We were right in that match last time we lost to them. It was a super tiebreaker and we were right there, so we thought if it was a full third set maybe we could have pulled it out. Today we were just thinking, we’re right there with these guys, we just need one or two points to go our way and we could beat them this time, and it happened that way. We played really well today. We definitely played better than the last time we played them.”
The difference on Wednesday from the first match was Montgomery’s poise in the most important spots. After a tight first set, it was the Cougars that controlled the decisive battles in the final two sets.
“We won the big points — break points and break points against us we held them off, we won the big points, the long deuce games,” Anderson said. “When it came down to it, we won the big points today.”
The duo has all the makings of a top team. They have worked well all season and groomed themselves into a championship finalist.
“Doubles is definitely different than singles and something you definitely have to work at,” Anderson said. “Last year, being with Coach T (Erik Tavel), he taught us a lot of stuff. I really practice stuff like serve and volleying and being aggressive on my returns, really working on specific doubles things and that’s really what helped us coming into today.
“I think we’re a good team because he has big forehands and big groundstrokes and I like to work the net, and with his serve and groundstrokes, it really sets me up well at the net to do my thing. So that’s how we kind of work off each other.”
Once the two had their shots working, there were few answers for Livingston. It’s been that way for most of their opponents.
“We definitely have big serves, and our serves set up each other at the net to put away the ball,” Pancha said. “That was especially the case in the third set today. Also, we’re friends and we get along pretty well. We’d only played two or three times coming into the season. We kind of thought we’d be partners and we figured out we were going to be partners. We worked on perfecting everything that we were working on.”
Their work together has helped build them into a strong tandem, one that was looking forward to its first meeting of the year with a highly regarded Newark Academy team. Just earning that chance to compete for the championship is significant for Anderson and Pancha as they advanced as far as possible.
“It means everything,” Anderson said. “It’s just awesome. I’ve never wanted this season to end. The past four years, I’ve been loving playing tennis with these guys, my teammates, and putting the Montgomery jersey on every day. I almost don’t want it to end. It’d be a good way to end — going out on top.”