When the top high school boys tennis players in New York State gathered last weekend at the USTA-Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, it included plenty of local star power.
Fayetteville-Manlius, Jamesville-DeWitt and Christian Brothers Academy would ultimately have six players join the Section III squad bound for New York City.
They all earned their spots in the sectional state qualifying tournament, which started Thursday at Utica Parkway and concluded a day later at Syracuse University’s Skytop Courts.
F-M’s star duo of Taran Judge and Riley Ma dominated the doubles tournament, beating J-D’s Somil Aggarwal and Mark Bratslavsky 6-1, 6-0 and getting past Noah Lifgren and Pierce Snyder (Cooperstown) 6-2, 6-2 in the early rounds.
A 6-0, 6-0 semifinal rout of Oneida’s Aidan and Ajay Hicks put Judge and Ma in the final, where the Red Rams’ duo of Essex Glowaki and Dhruv Nanavati waited after their own successful run to the state tournament.
Glowaki and Nanavati won, 6-3, 6-2, over Anthony and Robert Salerno (Fulton), then handled Sean Austin and Ben Cyr (Chittenango) 6-1, 6-0, leading to the semifinals, where a state tournament berth was clinched by a 6-3, 6-1 win over West Genesee’s Matt Mannara and James Plunkett.
The final wasn’t too close as Judge and Ma only allowed three games in a 6-2, 6-1 victory over Glowaki and Nanavati, while Mannara and Plunkett earned the third and final state tournament spot, beating the Hicks brothers 7-6, 6-3.
Earlier in that same tournament, Mannara and Plunkett had beaten F-M’s Joel Farella and Jeremy Zhang 7-6, 6-4 in the quarterfinals. Aggarwal and Bratslavsky had beaten Manlius-Pebble Hill’s Camden Ciotoli and Keerthi Martyn 6-3, 6-0.
Meanwhile, in the singles division, CBA’s Dean and Ben Vlassis ended up on a collision course, paired in the same half of the bracket and meeting in the semifinals, where Dean won 6-0, 6-0 after beating Watertown IHC’s Dan Snow and F-M’s Rohan Dhawan in the early rounds, the latter a 6-0, 6-1 win as CBA’s Shivam Nanavati lost, 7-5, 6-1 to Baldwinsville’s Antonio Marsallo.
Dean Vlassis was helped by the fact that Ben had gone through a tough quarterfinal against Auburn’s Scott Minnoe, needing three sets to prevail 6-2, 3-6, 6-4 after handling Fulton’s Eric Shear 6-2, 6-2, in the previous round.
This meant that Ben Vlassis and J-D’s Peter Hatton would meet in the third-place match to see who advanced to the state tournament. Before that, Hatton had lost just four games in two matches against Joe Ocker (Mexico) and John Robert Corasaniti (New Hartford) before a semifinal where, on the brink of advancing, he lost, 2-6, 6-2, 7-6, to Cazenovia’s Nate Romig.
Somehow, Hatton recovered from that tough disappointment against Ben Vlassis, working through two close sets to prevail 6-4, 7-5, and earn his own state tournament spot.
Meanwhile, the final between Romig and Dean Vlassis was quite a battle. Vlassis won the first set 6-4, only to have Romig rebound and pull out the second set 7-5. Late in the final set, Vlassis regained the edge and defeated Romig in another 6-4 decision.
