Bi-City’s best tennis players serve up late-season success

Success is measured in a couple of ways.

On one hand, there is ultimate success: Winning state championships. Two area tennis teams accomplished that feat and are being recognized for being the best. Then there is also the success of exceeding expectations under challenging circumstances.

In either case, that success was enough to earn All-Bi-City honors.

For the girls, Columbus coach MikelAnna Hill and her star freshman Mary Weston Courville led the team to a perfect 25-0 record and a Class 5A state championship, the team’s first in program history. Just across town, Brookstone coach Mary Lynne Cumiskey and player Gracie Hemmings led the Lady Cougars to a state championship of their own. The coaches are the 2016 Ledger-Enquirer All-Bi-City co-coaches of the year and players co-players of the year.

For the boys, Brookstone senior Jack Pease went undefeated in the city and capped his high school career off with over 45 wins as he led his team to a state semifinals appearance. Columbus coach Will Ginn, in his first year with the program, helped his team reach the state quarterfinals, a plateau it hadn’t hit in three years. They are the boys player and coach of the year.

The Lady Blue Devils played a difficult schedule and still managed the perfect record en route to a title. That included a close win over Brookstone.

Putting it mildly, Courville said there was a lot of work that went into the team’s success.

Hill said she still has a hard time grasping the accomplishment because of how difficult some of the matches were. But when the team won its second tournament of the year at the Granger Invitational, she knew it was a possibility.

“We were beating 6A schools and former state champions,” she said. “After we won that, I thought, ‘Ok, we can hang with the big guys.’ ”

That’s even more impressive for Courville, who was a freshman getting her first dose of high school competition. Still, she went 22-1, her only loss coming in a tiebreaker against co-player of the year Hemmings.

“She was amazing,” Hill said of Courville. “As a freshman in the No. 1 court, she beat girls who hadn’t lost a match their entire high school career. She was just someone that everybody relied on.”

So was Hemmings for Brookstone.

She went 16-0, helping to lead the Lady Cougars to a state title. Every year is a new year, Cumiskey said, and teams rely on different players. This year, it was Hemmings.

“She’s phenomenal,” Cumiskey said. “She’s one of the best players to come out of Columbus. She has such a bright future. She hits the ball solid, she has good execution and great court sense.”

Pease has been playing tennis since he was young, and he said it meant a lot to go undefeated in the city this season.

“I improved most at my mental game,” he said. “Sometimes I’m not always the best player, but I was able to keep my head in there and pull out matches against people who were probably better than me.”

Elsewhere, at Columbus, Ginn said it meant a lot to be able to help his team improve on its past couple of seasons in his first year at the helm.

The challenge when he came in was that players were unsure of what to expect from their new coach, and vice versa.

“I kind of took cues from the team, the seniors, about how they wanted to approach this season, and I just tried to facilitate that for them,” Ginn said.

The result was 15 regular-season wins and a trip to the state quarterfinals.

“We had a fantastic postseason,” Ginn said.

This story was originally published June 1, 2016 at 7:48 PM with the headline "Bi-City’s best tennis players serve up late-season success."