Merced High tennis team makes history with section championship
The Merced High boys tennis team made history Thursday, winning the school’s first Sac-Joaquin Section boys team title since 1991.
The second-seeded Bears defeated fourth-seeded Kennedy 6-3 to win the section Division 3 championship at the University of the Pacific.
The Bears’ top four singles players — James Tetangco, Ian Hansford, Alejandro Martinez and Parth Mishra — all won their matches to give Merced a 4-2 lead. The Bears just needed one doubles victory to earn the title.
Merced’s No. 1 doubles team of Carlos Montanez and Gagandeep Singh won in a third-set tie-breaker to give the Bears their fifth win of the match and clinch the victory.
“This Kennedy team is super, super deep,” Merced coach Keith Tetangco told Shawn Jansen of the Merced Union High School District. “We knew we had the advantage at the top of the lineup. But this run (Kennedy) had, we knew that all their guys would battle. I hoped one of our teams would get a big lead, but once all the double matches started, I knew it was going to be a battle.”
The Bears tennis team became the fourth Merced High team to win a section title this school year, joining boys and girls water polo and flag football, according to Jansen.
“I don’t think there is another team on the planet Earth that has better chemistry and the heart that this team has,” Hansford, a senior, told Jansen. “You won’t find a team that is really so close, and I think that contributes to our success. If there was going to be any team that would do it, it was going to be us. We really deserve this, we worked hard for this.”
