Success, as the saying goes, breeds success.
So it is with Sequim’s boys tennis team, after a banner season and Olympic League tournament on Oct. 17-18.
The Wolves finished with an 11-1 regular-season mark and the league’s 2A title – their seventh partial or outright crown in eight years – and followed it by taking six of the league’s 10 berths to the district tournament.
That lineup includes the league’s No. 1 doubles seed (Reed Gunstone and Mallory Maloney) and No. 2 singles seed (Ettore Scudo).
Up next for Sequim is a big wait: the boys join the Wolves’ girls squad in the West Central District playoffs in mid-May. The top three singles and doubles teams from that tourney qualify for the class 2A state tournament, slated for May 29-30 in Seattle.
And though two of Sequim’s singles players and two doubles teams have low (fourth and fifth) seeds, coach Mark Textor likes the chances of each of Sequim’s entries to vie for a state berth.
Gunstone and Maloney, the duo who qualified for the 2A state tourney last year and won one of three matches there, needed just three matches to secure the league championship. They survived a three set win against Curtis Pitcher and Jeff Jaeckel of Klahowya – 6-7 (7-4), 6-3, 6-4 – for the crown. They were 5-0 as a doubles team during the regular season.
Robbie Blenk and Alex Lamb fell to Gunstone and Maloney in the league tourney semifinals but rebounded to get a win against teammates Michael Lee and Greg Robinson in the consolation semis to earn the fourth seed. They were perfect (6-0) as partners in the regular season.
Lee and Robinson, who were similarly undefeated as regular-season partners (7-0), fell to Klahowya’s Jaeckel and Pitcher before reeling off a pair of wins at league. Following a loss to Blenk and Lamb, the two topped Ian Norris and Perry Pearsal of the Chimacum-Port Townsend team, 6-1 and 6-4, for the fifth and final seed
to districts.
Scudo, an exchange student from Italy, racked up an impressive 9-1 mark as Sequim’s No. 2 singles player and, for the last four weeks of the season, their top singles player when Gunstone shifted to doubles play. He dropped a quarterfinal match to Kingston’s Jerol Bird in the Olympic League tourney before rebounding for three big wins, the last a 7-6 (7-5), 6-1 victory against Cory Barker of North Mason.
Waylon Lam, a freshman, was 5-0 as a singles player in the regular season. He lost to Barker and Scudo at the league final but finished with a 3-2 mark and the No. 4 seed.
David Richards, a sophomore, played mostly doubles in the season’s first half, then went 5-1 as a singles player. He rebounded from a first-round loss to Bird at league to win three straight, then topped Port Townsend’s Stevie Weaver 6-4, 6-0 to gain the fifth and final seed to districts.
