Packers tennis team finally gets a win

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, February 22, 2018

MOULTRIE – There’s losing, and there’s losing competitively. Until Thursday, Colquitt County High boys tennis was “losing competitively” in the 2018 season. It’s something coach Mell Wier said the Pack didn’t do last season.

On Thursday at the Packer Park courts, Colquitt turned it all around with the season’s first team win, 5-0 against Bainbridge High.

In a best-of-3 format, all three singles matches went to three sets. Wier said that’s also what happened earlier in the week when the Packers played at Coffee High. In Douglas, Colquitt lost all of those matches despite victories in both doubles encounters. So, in “losing competitively,” it was 3-2 Trojans.

Facing Bainbridge, No. 1 singles Hayden Holloway lost his first set 4-6. The rest of it was 6-1, 6-0.

The doubles pairs were straight set winners. Aaron Long and John Melvin Herndon prevailed 6-4, 6-2 while Alyn Herndon and Nathan Corley coasted 6-0, 6-1.

That was enough for the team victory, but there were two highly entertaining matches still on-going. Chris Rogers was a 2-1 winner, both his set wins done in tiebreakers (Wier said he also took two sets to tiebreakers at Coffee).

Rogers had one-game advantages in his first set but could not get a break. In the tiebreaker, he was ahead 5-4 at the start of three points in a row to win 7-4.

Bainbridge leveled things in the second set 6-2. In the third, Rogers was trailing 2-3 when he broke the Bearcat serve. He would take a 4-3 lead, but then Bainbridge broke his serve. Rogers got that game back for a 5-5 tie. With a great net point and lob over his opponent to the back line, he was up 6-5.

The visitors would tie it. Two backhand winners, a rare successful first serve and double fault put him up in the tiebreaker 5-2, and Rogers won 7-3.

No. 3 singles Carlos Fuller, who had played doubles at the beginning, dropped his first set 3-6, won the second 7-5 and got ahead 5-4 in the third. Facing serve, Fuller smashed a winner and got a double fault to win.