The boys’ varsity tennis team won the Central Massachusetts Championship on May 26 with a 3-2 win over Shrewsbury. The season officially came to an end on June 2 with a 2-3 loss to Arlington during their first game of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) state tournament. 

The team wrapped up the season with a 12-7 record.

“It’s been a great season,” senior captain Henry Zhao said. “At the beginning of the season we had a strong team, in the middle we had a slight dip because of the stress of senior and junior year, but in the end we came together as a collective group and even if people weren’t playing, they were cheering each other on.”

Zhao credits the team’s spirit and desire to make coach Gerald Cushing’s last season as a coach memorable for taking them to the CMASS finals.

“The CMASS final had a pretty electric atmosphere,” Zhao said. “It was on neutral grounds, but there was a little bit of pressure because we had lost pretty badly to the team, Shrewsbury, before, but we came off some momentum from a previous win and we knew we had the capability of winning, and we were also motivated because it was our coach’s final season coaching.”

This season, there were many standout players, consisting of individuals who are more experienced with tennis, as well as those who just started playing. 

“We had a few seniors join us this year that did not play tennis beforehand and they really stood out to me like David Burmeister, Shivnath Shankar and Susmith Divi,” Zhao said. “There were also a few freshmen that came out such as Jackson Stiles, Cael Ganem, Musa Guler and Sabir Sethi, who has been really consistent.”

With the program losing 10 seniors and the head coach, Zhao admits the team has a lot of work to do but is optimistic about the future. 

“The plan is to have a new coach step in and to encourage people who play tennis who weren’t on the team beforehand to join the team and those who played this year to continue practicing,” Zhao said. “And with the great facilities from Gonkplex, I think we can have a pretty slow but strong rebuilding process for the tennis team.”