OBSERVER Photo by Matt Spielman
Fredonia’s Nella Darrell-Sterbak hits a return during the CCAA girls tennis singles championship against Chautauqua Lake’s Eden Ludwig on Saturday at the Lakewood YMCA.
LAKEWOOD — Grace Kutschke had a legitimate chance to reach the singles semifinals at the Chautauqua-Cattaraugus Athletic Association girls tennis tournament this week at the Lakewood YMCA.
A 6-4, 6-1 loss in the quarterfinals Thursday ended that shot.
Instead, the Frewsburg junior regrouped and entered the doubles draw with Brooke Golab, her senior teammate and the Bears’ No. 2 singles player during the regular season.
Both are glad she did.
The Bears duo swept a pair of matches Friday to reach semifinals and then won two more matches Saturday to earn the CCAA doubles title and the league’s corresponding top seed in next week’s Section VI Championships.
“After two long days, I was a little nervous coming in today,” Frewsburg head coach Jamie Sposato said. “They came out, they were excited, they were positive and they had really good energy. … They ended up finishing it, which was fantastic.”
Fredonia’s Nella Darrell-Sterbak, somewhat surprisingly, won the CCAA singles title Saturday after a pair of victories of her own, including a 6-4, 6-2 win over Chautauqua Lake’s Eden Ludwig in the final. The finalists beat a pair of undefeated Falconer girls in the semifinals.
“My goal was to win counties,” Darrell-Sterbak said. “Now, I’m like, I can do more.”
In the semifinals, Kutschke and Golab dispatched of Southwestern’s Dani Mincarelli and Audrey DeLong 6-2, 6-0. On the other side of the bracket, Olean’s Lina Chauhdry and Natalie Snyder — both singles players throughout the regular season — beat Falconer’s Rachael Swanson and Elena Barie 6-3, 6-2.
“She has some doubles experience and I think she showed that today,” Sposato said of Kutschke. “As soon as they started going in a couple of those first matches, I felt like they were back in it as a doubles team.”
Kutschke and Golab then won the first set of the championship match against Chauhdry and Snyder 6-3.
“She wanted to go in singles,” Sposato said of Kutschke, “but the biggest thing was that she was going to give it 110% in singles and if it didn’t happen, she wanted to go far in doubles.”
The Huskies duo rallied in the second set, winning 6-3 and in the process, turning the match in their favor. Kutschke and Golab used the brief intermission between the second and third sets to their advantage, jumping out to a 4-3 lead in the decisive set before winning the final three games for a 6-3 victory.
“There was like a fog. It was like ‘OK, we know some of the mistakes we made. We missed a lot of shots.’ We reminded ourselves what we did in the first set,” Sposato said of the break between sets. “Grace said ‘Let’s do what we did in the first set, moving really well, hitting parts of the court.’ They came out, it got really tight in the end, but it worked out well.”
Darrell-Sterbak and Ludwig did what nobody could throughout the regular season, beating undefeated Falconer’s top two singles players in the semifinals. Darrell-Sterbak beat Myla Brainard 4-6, 6-2, 6-1, while Ludwig topped Riley Farrugello 2-6, 6-2, 6-1.
During the regular season, Brainard beat Darrell-Sterbak 10-6 in Falconer and 6-4, 6-4 in Fredonia.
“It was really cool,” Darrell-Sterbak said of coming out on the right side of a match against Brainard. “It took a lot of work.”
In the championship match, Darrell-Sterbak grinded through a 6-4 win in the first set before coasting to the title with a 6-2 win.
“The last two years, I won in doubles,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
Swanson and Barie earned the CCAA’s final sectional spot in doubles with a 6-3, 6-0 win over Mincarelli and DeLong. Brainard, on the other hand, took the third singles spot when she went up 6-0 on her teammate, Farrugello, who ultimately retired.
The Section VI Championships will take place Friday and Saturday at the Lakewood YMCA. Top players from the Erie County Interscholastic Conference, Niagara Frontier League and Buffalo Public Schools will make up the 16 spots in each bracket. Play will begin Friday at noon and continue Saturday at 3 p.m.
The top three singles players and top four doubles teams from the sectional tournament will qualify for the New York State Public High School Athletic Association Championships, which will be held Monday, Oct. 28 through Wednesday, Oct. 30 at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing.