Boys tennis whips Watkins Mill

The boys tennis team picked up their winning streak today with a 7-0 victory against their Watkins Mill rivals.

Today's game was a non divisional match, meaning the team was relieved of a load of pressure that is present at divisional games. Nevertheless, the Blazers did not slack off and pushed relentlessly through the match like they would in any divisional meet.

Number one player Michael Price scared his teammates during the second set in which he cut it close with a 6-4 victory. But Price's faultless combination of searing serves and fiery ground strokes in the first set more than made up for his difficulties later on, earning Price the match, 6-0, 6-4.

Price attributes his fallback later in the match to poor technique and his opponent's increasing strength and strategy. "My ground stokes and serves weren't that good. They weren't very hard and deep," he said. "In the second set, my opponent started to push. He basically just hit the balls into the court until I missed and since I'm not that consistent, I ended up missing a lot."

Coach David Ngbea agreed that most points Price gave up were due to his own errors and added that lack of concentration and weak maneuvering also played a role in Price's four-game-giveaway. "[Price] needs to work on his footwork," he said. "After he hit the ball, he didn't recover. He would hit and then wait and see what the other guy would do. As long as he gets focused, he'll be fine. [Price's opponent] is giving Mike Chances to make mistakes. He's not trying to hit winners, a good strategy."

Next door on singles court two, senior co-captain Rahul Satija struggled a bit with his opponent but soon recovered, taking his time on serves, combining drop shots with subsequent overheads to repeatedly outsmart his opponent and seize the match.

Ngbea blames Satija's troubles during the match on delayed reactions to the movement of the ball, a problem the coach said hurt Satija's fluidity on the court. "[Satija] waits for the ball to bounce, then reacts," he explained. "By the time he gets to the ball, the ball is too low. He needs to react to the ball as soon as it hits his opponent's racket so that the ball is at waist level when he hits it. It's difficult to be consistent when you're hitting the ball at knee level."

In doubles, court two duo sophomore Kevin Chai and junior Ji-Heon Kim combined overheads that cleared the fence by several feet with piercing volleys and swift overhead slams to wrap up the 6-1, 6-0 match in little more than a half an hour.

Chai attributed his team's triumph to the strategies pounded into his head during practice. "Our coach always preaches ‘poaching' at the net. That's when you try to win all points with volleys," he explained. "We saw [the opponent's] weak shots and were aggressive at the net which created easy shots that we could just slam."