“The whole team is excited about next year — they can’t wait,” Kevin McConville, who coaches East Hampton High School’s boys tennis team, said last Thursday, following the young team’s 5-2 loss the day before at top-seeded Ward Melville in the semifinal round of Suffolk County’s team tournament.
There were no seniors on Bonac’s team this spring. Max Astilean, its number-one singles player, and Armando Rangel, who alternated between second and third doubles, both juniors, were the eldest.
East Hampton’s wins came from Henry Cooper and Jagger Cohen, eighth graders, at second doubles, and from Rangel and Miguel Garcia at three. Chris Pilarski, a sophomore, and Dane Schwalbe, a ninth grader, lost in straight sets at first doubles, as did East Hampton’s four singles players — Astilean, Cameron Mitchell, a sophomore, Nick Cooper, a sophomore, and Kiefer Mitchell, a ninth grader. The younger Mitchell’s scores were 7-6, 6-4.
“We’re a year away, and all of us knew it,” said McConville, whose team finished the season at 17-2, both losses coming at the hands of Ward Melville, which edged the Bonackers 4-3 here on May 5. “Their coach, who was missing some players in that first match, said we were even more impressive this time, regardless of the final score,” McConville reported the Patriots’ coach, Erick Sussin, as having said.
Ward Melville had in its lineup several players who finished high up in the recent county singles and doubles tournaments.
Next year, McConville said, he’ll redouble his efforts to make sure his squad scrimmages or plays nonleaguers with the county’s strong teams so that the playoff seedings will be rendered more realistic. “We would have scrimmaged [second-seeded] Commack this year, but we couldn’t get a bus. Westhampton Beach should have been one of our league opponents, but, for some reason, wasn’t. . . . I want to get us as good a schedule as I can next year. The only competitive match we had this season was the one with Ward Melville.”
McConville has repeatedly said in recent weeks that his doubles teams were what made the Bonackers tough to beat, and in a county quarterfinal match played here with fifth-seeded Harborfields on May 24 it was a doubles team — Pilarski and Garcia, the second pairing — that enabled East Hampton to win that match 4-3, thus setting up the semifinal with Ward Melville.
“Everyone was watching Chris and Miguel’s match at the end — they won 6-4 in the third set,” McConville said of the exciting win over the Tornadoes.
Others who won for East Hampton that day were Nick Cooper, Kiefer Mitchell, and Schwalbe at second, third, and fourth singles. The first and third doubles teams, Cohen and Henry Cooper, and Rangel and Carlos Quintana, lost, in straight sets, as did Astilean.
The first East Hamptoner to win a division singles championship since Matt Rubenstein did it in 2004, Astilean, a hard-hitting left-hander, slugged it out toe-to-toe with Chris Qi, a finalist in this year’s county singles tournament and the second-ranked player in the state, but forehand errors, largely off low-bouncing balls, hurt him during the course of the 6-3, 6-1 loss.
Astilean broke Qi in the first game, but was broken in turn — a drop shot that fell unclaimed putting Qi up 2-1. Two great forehand winners enabled Astilean to hold for 2-2, but his opponent swept through the next three games for a 5-2 lead. Astilean held at love for 5-3, but Qi also held, at 4-2, for the set.
Astilean lost his serve to begin the second, and it was 4-0 before the Bonac lefty got on the scoreboard. Qi ended the set, and the match, at 6-1, with a crisp forehand volley.
When the team was at full strength this spring, its second and third doubles teams didn’t lose. This season was also notable for the fact that eight Bonackers qualified as a result of their divisional showings to play in the county individual tournament. The 2005 team led by Brian Rubenstein, and coached by Rich Mothes, qualified three singles players and three doubles teams that year. In the end, only Astilean and Cohen played in the county tourney this year, with Astilean advancing to the quarterfinals. Illness prevented their fellow qualifiers from competing.
This summer, as he has done for the past six years, McConville will give clinics to advanced players, either at the high school or at the East Hampton Indoor/Outdoor Club, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
