By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
With sectional titles already in hand, the West Windsor-Plainsboro High South boys tennis team kept its hopes of a Tournament of Champions title alive on Wednesday while Montgomery High fell just short.
After winning the Central Jersey Group III title with a 5-0 win over Moorestown, WW-P South added a Group III state title on Wednesday with a 4-1 win over Millburn on Wednesday. The Pirates advanced to the TOC, which will begin on Tuesday at Mercer County Park.
“Everybody feels good,” WW-P South coach Richard Arnold said. “I tell them to try not to get too cocky. We have had some tough matches and we will have some more tough matches. We’re (27-2) and not doing a bad job. The only team we lost to is Newark Academy.”
The Pirates are the No. 3 seed in the TOC and will face Mountain Lakes in the opening round on Tuesday. The winner will play second-seeded Westfield.
“Everybody has a good attitude,” Arnold said. “I just don’t want them to be overconfident and take anyone for granted. You don’t want to be too relaxed and the intensity is not there.”
Montgomery fell just short of a Group IV state title and a spot in the TOC when it fell to Westfield, 4-1, in the Group IV final. The Cougars had beaten East Brunswick for the CJ IV title and came up just short of a state title.
The Cougars will still have players in the state singles and state doubles tournaments, including the first doubles team of Eric Wang and Kevin XU, which is the No. 2 seed in the doubles tournament and has been putting together a great season after what looked like a cocky start.
“I think our games complement each other,’ Wang said. “In the beginning we had some communication issues and we would run into each other. But after a while it was a lot better and now we know where each of us are at all times.
“We played a lot of practice sets together during tryouts and then our coach decided to put us together and it worked out perfectly. Our first tryout match we played a team we felt like we were better than and we struggled a lot.”
In their first regular season match, Wang and Xu lost the first four games before putting it together for a win. They have been on a roll ever since.
“We have been improving throughout the season and we are getting better every day,” Xu said. “We just knew that we would find it.”
And while they hoped to get through with a state championship, the loss to Westfield can’t diminish a great season for the Cougars. And their head coach saw something special in his first doubles team right from the start.
“The process I put these guys through is daunting,” Montgomery coach Raheel Saleem said. “I stayed true to what I really believed would work. Seeing them work together I had a good feeling that they had the intangibles that would make it so those two would really work well together.
“It is so hard to explain to the players but it is something you can see. I might not be out there on the court — they could be on Court 6 and I could be on Court 1 — but I am still seeing what they are doing. It’s not even what they are doing on the tennis court. It is how they are communicating outside of the court like when they are hanging out on the bleachers together. You see the way they communicate with each other and that carries over onto the court. Eric is so quick and pretty aggressive at the net and Kevin just doesn’t miss. There is a good balance between the two.”
WW-P North reached the CJ III final and fell to Millburn.
