A Tough Loss and a Tough Win

Monday we had a big match against Metuchen which will probably determine the winner of the White Division-- and the two smallest schools by a large margin are at the top of the leaderboard-- and while the match started ugly for us, we made a nice comeback and Alex-- at second singles-- came up with a big win against last year's first singles player; Ian, unfortunately, had to play their young phenom, who stepped right into the first singles slot, and though Ian took an early lead, he lost the first set-- and he asked me what to do when "all this kid hits are winners" and I told him to hit it deep and hang in, which he did and he won the second set 6-3 so they headed to a third; meanwhile, Boyang was struggling at third singles, and our first and second doubles lost the first set- so I thought it was over-- but apparently the second doubles team are crazy twin brothers (two of three triplets) who are great athletes but often flake out, which they did and so our second doubles won the second and third sets, Alex won his match-- epic-- Boyang and first doubles lost; so it was two -two and it all came down to Ian at first singles-- and he pulled the heavy hitter into a third set but then went down 4-0 and it looked like all was lost . . . but Ian won four in a row and then split, so it was 5-5 (and the text strand to my wife was getting more and more insane) and then they fought it out to the end and Ian lost 7-5 . . . unfortunate, but-- as I reminded the team-- most teams are playing for nothing right now, so the fact that we got to play a huge match at the end of the season is what it's all about . . . especially as a coach and a dad, I was happy to be there and happy to be involved-- anyway, we had to recover to play South Plainfield, another good team, who beat Wardlaw twice on Monday-- a very good team-- and Ian recovered and won against a good player in two sets, but we had troubles elsewhere so it all came down to second doubles-- and they were bickering a bit when the match went to a third set-- but we were able to calm them down and they won the third set 6-2, giving us an excellent victory after a tough loss (and, as a side note, Alex had an AP test yesterday-- AP Calc BC-- and he won his match, and Ian had an AP test today-- AP Lang-- and he won, so I told both my kids those were banner days, more happened in a day that will often happen in a year of adulthood).