Our school’s Tennis team has played their final game of the season. They have played to their best and have gotten up to Semi-Finals going against Leon M. Goldstein High School.
Victor Wang, the coach of the tennis team believes in his team’s abilities and their training but there are outside factors that affect the game play, such as tennis background before high school and money.
“As far as doing things differently, I don’t know. I played the game, like, a hundred times in my head. I don’t know if there was a lot of things they can do differently. Tennis is an interesting sport because in tennis, like, if you are the team with the most experience and oftentimes more money, they win,” Wang said.
Their matches all happened at once as they had enough space for it as they played on Queens College tennis court venue. They had five different matches happening at the same time doubles and singles.
“The first three players, the top three, play a singles match, which means they have just one on one. And then the last two are two versus two,” Wang said.
“Like, the first singles was very good, so we have. I said to my first singles, Ihsan, that you have to really be careful about his serve because that guy was probably the best server in the entire the entire league, so just really be careful about the serve,” Wang said.
As the matches went on simultaneously with the different types of singles and doubles. There were also different grades playing Seniors, Juniors and Sophomores.
For the seniors it would be their last year. Hassan Ahmed was a senior in the tennis team, Ahmed enjoys playing the game and collaborating with his team though he will miss it and wished they could have played the competitions for longer.
“It felt good, you know, playing the last time with my teammates, but we ended up short by getting to the semifinals,” Ahmed said.
They have played up to semifinals before last year and know that the Leon M. Goldstein High School has its advantages so Hassan wanted to play to at least their best being semifinals which they did achieve.
“So, all of us were really motivated to get once again to the same spot we were last year in the semifinals, and we did that. So, every day in practice, we made sure we worked hard to get to the same level,” Ahmed said.
Hassan is proud of the team and has enjoyed the years he has played tennis but is not planning on doing it professionally in college, he might do it as a school club.
Then we have the juniors who are coming to be seniors going onto their last year. Jose Espinoza-Cando is a current junior going to be a senior in tennis next year.
“I think semi-finals is definitely kind of, I’d say emotional in some way because I knew that it wasn’t just me playing but everybody else playing and I could return to the team next year but there’s others, the majority of the team couldn’t since we had like five seniors on the team,” Espinoza-Cando said.
Espinoza-Cando was disappointed that they couldn’t go further especially because he knew next year many of the team members would be gone, as they were seniors. He did, however, still have pride in his team for how far they came.
“I don’t know if I’m gonna have the same opportunity next year considering half our roster was already gone this year and also knowing that what me and my partner Caroline had done during the season it still wasn’t enough to win semi-finals so in some way I was still proud of getting there but I wasn’t completely proud of the fact that we weren’t able to get to that level where we wanted to be so that we could go to finals,” Espinoza-Cando said.
As a current junior Espinoza-Cando has goals for himself and his team for next year as it will be their last year and so he wants to get that opportunity and will work hard for it.
Then there is Simon Adhikari who is a sophomore in the tennis team who played during the semi-finals.
“I think, because it was my first time actually playing in semifinals, because last year I was a sub, so I didn’t really get to play,” Adhikari said.
Simon Adhikari wants to improve himself before the new season starts both to improve mentally and physically. Mentally because of his state of mind.
“But this year, because it was my first time, I was getting in my head too much. So anytime I missed a shot, I’ll put myself down instead of encouraging myself to do better,” Adhikari said.
Then physically because Adhikari wanted to better his serve in tennis.
“If I want to play singles, I have to have a better serve than I have right now. Because it’s not consistent,” Adhikari said.
These were the three different grades of tennis players who competed in the semifinals, gave it their best shot, still wanted to improve with a coach that believes in them and their abilities.
“We’re just gonna keep working hard and try to improve our tennis skills,” Wang said. “And at the end of the day, we just wanna be able to build a program. And, you know, we just keep working.”
