After reaching the Central Coast Section semifinals and placing second in the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League last year, the Palo Alto High School boys’ tennis team will use the 2011 season to rebuild its team after losing much of its 2010 lineup to graduation.
According to junior Justin Wang, the team has only five returning players. Junior Nicky Hu, who played singles last year, has decided not to play this year due to schoolwork, while the team lost Drew Pearson, Chase Cooper, Alex Freeman, Peter Tseng, Grant Audet, Michael Li, Jeffery Wang and Baramee Wongbanchai to graduation. The team’s strength this year will be its youth, according to head coach Andy Harader.
“We’ve had to replace almost the whole team,” Wang said. “We had five guys left from last year and we have 15 now, so we have ten new guys.”
The Vikings have been practicing constantly to make up for the loss of last year’s players.
“We’ve all worked hard over the off season and will do the best we can because we’ve lost many key players last year,” Wang said.
The newcomers include freshmen Austin Leung, Blake Smith and Aditya Mahadevan; sophomores Philipp de Fries, Charlie Dulik, Peter Skorokhodov and Mason Haverstock; juniors Dar Shavit and Will Lichtenger and senior Lucas Fodor. According to Harader, an important addition is freshman Austin Leung.
“He [Leung] is the number one singles player on team and will be a big factor in rebuilding our team along with all our underclassmen players,” Harader said.
Harader believes reaching the CCS tournament is a reasonable goal for the Vikings. However, because of the major changes, Harader said the team’s success can go either way.
“We’ll try to make CCS,” Harader said. “But there are no expectations. It is a rebuilding year; but, that being said, the team could do well.”
Despite the focus on rebuilding, the Vikings are off to a strong start that defies their inexperience. The Vikings won the California Division Three State Championship Tournament last weekend in Fresno, Calif., beating Valley Christian, Buchanan, Turloc, and Liberty to secure the title.
The Vikings will next play the Leland High School Chargers at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at Paly.