4/2 Doubles – Andover: 2, BB&N: 1
4/2 Singles – Andover: 7, BB&N: 0
On Wednesday, Boys Tennis showed out in its season opener against Buckingham Browne & Nichols (BB&N). As defending champions of the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) Class A Championships, they won two of three doubles matches and swept all seven singles matches.
Approaching the match, George Richardson ’27 commented on the team’s mentality. In tennis, where mentality often sets the winners apart from the losers, Richardson emphasized the necessity of a winning mentality.
“Before we started our matches, our coach prefaced by saying that we’re the defending champs, and everyone’s gonna want to beat us. We knew that [BB&N] were going to give it their all in the court today. Even if we were a match point down or a match point up, you still can’t give up the lead whatsoever. A lot of us thought that since it was the first match of the season, we all wanted to play our A-game and show our skills before we play even bigger and better matches. Our mentality going into this was just like, focus, focus, focus. We had a tough few practices recently because of the rain in the previous week, but aside from that, we had a really dedicated mentality,” said Richardson.
Furthermore, Richardson expressed happiness in playing against familiar faces, as it brought a sense of camaraderie and support.
“We knew a lot of our opponents today. Some of them we’ve played with before in other events and tournaments. It was just nice seeing familiar faces out on the court today. Already knowing your opponents, having that camaraderie with our opponents before the start of the match, that was pretty nice,” said Richardson.
Despite trailing at the beginning of his match, according to Jeff Shen ’26, Co-Captain Kevin Niu ’25 displayed grit and team support.
“As always, Kevin [performed exceptionally well]. The energy, the enthusiasm, the spirit, and the passion he brings to that court is unrivaled. We were all cheering each other on and unfortunately, Kevin got to a pretty slow start. He lost the first set of his match in his singles game, and that’s surprising because it’s not often Kevin loses. Regardless, he pulled it back in a three-set victory, and along the way, there were quite a lot of ‘come on’ and ‘let’s go’ coming from his court. Kevin’s very expressive but even after he finished his game, we had some other players like Ben Shin [’26], who was in a tough three setter and coming off that court, we were all able to channel Kevin’s energy from his wind and really use it to secure wins in the rest of the games,” said Shen.
Shen continued, “For a player like Kevin, you almost feel gratitude to have him on your team because whether he wins or loses, you always know that he’s going to bring positive energy and positive reinforcement to the team. He’s an integral part of this team, a great captain. He’s a great example for some of the younger players, and I really appreciate him for that.”
Additionally, Co-Captain Chase Burke ’25 emphasized the team’s mentality as defending champions and expressed his excitement to repeat its dominance
Burke said, “We’re still very confident going into the rest of the season. We still have our top six players from last year. Even though today we were missing one of our top players, we were still able to perform pretty well. We were undefeated last season, undefeated NEPSAC champions, so we’re super confident going into the rest of the season. We have high expectations for ourselves.”
Boys Tennis will travel to Taft this Saturday.
