Sectional tennis: Cloverleaf doubles team reaches end of the line

WOOSTER — The moment they rallied to win the first doubles championship and help the Cloverleaf boys tennis team claim the Metro Athletic Conference Tournament and overall league crown, juniors Kellen Price and Ashton Gray realized their first loss of the season was almost certain to come in their final match.The occurred Tuesday when Price and Gray won their first match and lost their second at the Wooster Division II Sectional to finish the season 15-1.Cloverleaf also got a win and a loss from singles player Ian Shultz and the doubles team of Drew Baltic and Macaden Bohan, while singles players Camden Tinter and Owen Brownson were eliminated in the first round.Price and Gray, who had never played tennis prior to deciding to attend tryouts in the spring of 2025, downed Canton South's Danny Dauliak and Brenden Meighen 6-1, 6-1 at the College of Wooster, but then fell to Orrville's unseeded Aaden Miller and Peyton Casto, the Red Riders' top singles players in the regular season, 6-3, 6-1."They worked together and were able to put balls away," Price said. "They were really good tennis players."Price and Gray, multisport athletes who are quickly learning the intricacies of a sport they've grown to love, played better than the set scores indicate.Down 3-1 in the first set, they rattled off two games to pull even, but Orrville held serve, broke Price at love and held again to close the opening set."We were telling ourselves we could do this, to keep the energy rolling and see what happened," Price said. "Then we made mistakes, they capitalized and it went downhill for us."The most important game of the match was the first game of the second set, when the Colts forced three deuces before Gray's serve was broken following an incredible point that featured a number of great volleys by both teams. The Red Riders seized control at that point and took the next four games before Cloverleaf got a break to win its only game of the set."We were hitting them hard and they were getting them back," Gray said of losing serve to begin the set. "It kept going back and forth and they got it. That's when the momentum switched. We were making them work, but we didn't close when we needed to close."Miller, Orrville's top singles player, and Casto, the No. 2 man, had solid but sometimes inconsistent serves, good groundstrokes and were able to win a lot of points with their net play."They were capitalizing off our mistakes," Gray said. "They were putting balls away when we were hitting it right to them. We can get better at topspin and we can learn to place balls better. We've been pretty good at net, but our back guy, whichever one of us it is, could improve."Shultz, who played third singles in the regular season, downed Norton's Levi Nichols 6-3, 6-1, then fell 6-0, 6-2 to Perry's hard-serving Dorian Hine.Baltic and Bohan, second doubles players in the regular season, opened with a 6-1, 6-3 victory over Canton South's Brayden Westrich and Zach Medley before getting blitzed 6-0, 6-0 by Perry's second-seeded Kaden Brewster and Andrew Morris."That was the best team I've ever played," said junior and third-year player Baltic, who doubles as a 6-foot, 260-pound offensive tackle for the Cloverleaf football team. "Their serves were very fast. Playing that team was fun. That was a great team. Some people start (playing tennis) so young — at 4 years old. They're incredible."Bohan, a freshman, also enjoyed the experience."I really like to play teams that are better and see what I can do against them," he said. "They had really good serves. It made it really hard to even start the point off."Contact Rick Noland at (330) 721-4046 or rnoland@medina-gazette.com.