WILKES-BARRE, PA (SEPTEMBER 10, 2022) -- The King's College Monarchs men's tennis team opened up their season just outside their back door at the Middle Atlantic Conference (MAC) Individual Championships at Kirby Park throughout the day Saturday. Senior
Logan Gregory and graduate student
Nick Harth both made it to the semi-finals in the singles tournament, while most of the players also made it to to the quarterfinals.
The day started out with the doubles where the lone Monarchs win came from the No. 2 doubles pair of junior Aidan Temple and freshman Brendan Turowski, who dominated Misericordia 8-2 before losing Lebanon Valley 8-1 in the quarterfinals.
The No. 1 doubles match saw Gregory and sophomore Patrick Pech fall to the top-ranked Stevens pairing of Olof Persson and Aashi Kulakarni 8-2.
The No. 3 doubles pairing of Harth and sophomore Jacob Nelson fell to Stevenson 8-5 while the No. 4 doubles pairing of sophomores Cody Zheng and Alex Nole lost 8-5 to DeSales.
After dropping his first set 5-7 to Augie Citrone of DeSales, Gregory rebounded to win the next two sets of the No. 1 singles quarterfinals by 6-2 and a hard-fought 10-8. He put up another gritty performance in the quarterfinals against Tej Laliwala of York. After winning the first set 6-3 Laliwala took a close second set 7-6 (3). But Gregory showed phenomenal resilience in a back-and-fourth deciding set to emerge victorious 10-8, earning a semi-finals berth.
In the No. 5 singles Harth won the first round over Dylan Huha of Albright 6-3 and 7-5. He then defeated Lance Fries of York by the same scores to advance to the semi-finals.
The No. 2 singles saw Pech defeat Tyler James of Hood by scores of 7-6 (9) and 6-2 before falling to Connor Rose of Messiah. Pech won the second set against Rose 6-3 but lost in the first and third by scores of 6-4 and 10-5.
Temple cruised past Dereck Burcick of Misericordia in the first round of No. 3 singles 6-2 and 6-1. Turowski also cruised past a Misericordia opponent in Peyton Argo by scores of 6-0 and 6-1. Both lost in the quarterfinals.
Nelson lost to Carl Anderson of Messiah in the quarterfinals by scores of 6-3 and 6-2 while Zheng lost to FDU-Florham's Karanveer Saini by scores of 6-3 in both sets.
Gregory and Harth will face off in tomorrow's singles semi-finals matchups. Gregory will face top-seeded Andrew He of Stevens while Harth will also face a top-seed Stevens opponent in Sebastian Wroe. Tomorrow's action will start an hour earlier with the doubles at 8 a.m.
--Monarchs--
