Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Girls’ doubles rally
helps Hailey in tennis

Wood River trips Jerome 10-2

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Powerful in girls’ singles all season with an amazing 17-1 record, the 3A Wood River High School tennis team showed it has a few doubles tricks up its sleeve Thursday during a meet at 4A Jerome.

Highlight of Wood River’s 10-2 romp over Jerome was the #1 girls’ doubles victory of Abby Fairman and Ellie France over Jerome’s 4A state runner-up team from 2003, Ashley Blevins and Ashley Martens.

Fairman and France squandered a 4-1 lead in the first game as the experienced Jerome pair put together a run to prevail 6-4, but the young Wolverine players won the final two sets 6-1, 6-2 to make it four doubles victories in six matches against Jerome.

Wood River coach John Radford said, "Abby and Ellie are tenacious and tough. They had an outstanding match against a good Jerome team—really playing well in the second set. Both girls communicate well and are very coachable.

"Overall, our entire team did extremely well at Jerome."

Wood River swept the girls’ and boys’ singles matches to win 10-2.

Leading the way, once again, with three straight- set wins was the dominant singles trio of #1 Hadley DeBree (6-0, 6-4), #2 Amanda Smith (6-4, 6-0) and #3 Ashley Prior (6-1, 6-1).

DeBree and Prior are undefeated with 6-0 records this season, in fact, the Wood River’s girls’ singles group is 17-1 and, in its last four matches, has gone 12-0—all straight-set wins giving up only 34 games.

Wood River also swept boys’ singles behind#1 Dao Okomoto (6-3, 7-6), an exchange student from Japan; #2 Thomas Phelan (6-1, 6-2); and #3 Kyle Niedrich (6-2, 7-5).

The deep Hailey squad also swept mixed behind #1 Danny Gariepy-Whitney DeBree (7-5, 6-3) and #2 Esteban Vega-Kira Gardner (6-4, 7-6). Vega is an exchange student from Ecuador who is improving daily.

Radford said, "We have some boys who didn’t even participate last year who are really coming on."

Adding a split-set triumph in #1 boys’ doubles was the Hailey team of Frank Fiaschetti and Will Roth. Nearly pulling off a win was #2 Mathias Goeke and Whit Harbaugh, who dropped a tough first-set tiebreaker than battled into the third set before falling 7-6 (7-5), 3-6, 6-2.

With Thursday’s win at Jerome, Wood River improved to 5-1 in dual meets this spring. The Wolverines have won five straight meets by a combined 45-15 score since dropping their opener 9-3 to Twin Falls.

Monday’s scheduled meet against Minico in Rupert was postponed due to rainy weather.

 

Home debut vs. Cutthroats

After bad weather wiped out its first two home meets of the 2004 season—April 8 against Gooding and last Thursday against Jerome—Wood River is eagerly awaiting its first-ever home meet on its new high school courts.

Fittingly, the home debut will come against Wood River’s arch-rival The Community School today, Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. in Hailey.

The Cutthroats, who started their season Tuesday, have won six straight district titles and tied with Wood River for second place in last year’s State 3A meet at Timberline in Boise.

First-year Hailey coach Radford feels good about his team’s chances against the always-tough Cutthroats. Radford said, "We’ve had a nice start to our season and we’re getting into the meat of our schedule. I feel good about our progress."

Wood River’s four-match home stand will include Friday’s meet with Hillcrest of Idaho Falls, then back-to-back matches against Declo and Minico next Tuesday and Wednesday.

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