For college tennis players, the month of January means only one thing—the start of the season! As we started the season, our first couple of matches took place in the most beautiful club you can find: the Kailua Racquet Club. I am proud that I can call this place our home and that we get to play all our home matches here.
However, last Friday we got a special opportunity to play against the University of Hawaii with their new head coach Hendrik Bode, who led the HPU tennis for more than a decade. The match was scheduled for late afternoon which meant a lot of people coming out to support both and see who is the best tennis team on the island of Oahu.
I personally got super excited, because playing in front of the crowd with sunset and under the lights in such a beautiful tennis club is something that I never even dreamt of. And of course, playing against your former coach is also something like an extra motivation that just adds some spice on top of it. These moments and matches are exactly the reason why we play college tennis in Hawaii and I am really glad for the opportunity to be here.
The match started with doubles and we came out strong to get the doubles point by getting 2 wins on position 1 and 3. All the sharks brought great energy and we were off to a very good start. Continuing with singles, there were a lot of ups and downs, especially on courts 1, 2, and 3. We got the win on positions 5 and 6 and lost on 4. The score was 3-1 for HPU when Mile Matic and Adam Vasir went to a third set knowing that we only needed to win 1 out of the 3 matches that were being played at that moment. Everyone got nervous and just kept checking the scores on other courts to see how much they needed to push the limits on their court. I could feel that we had more support from the crowd which I was honestly really happy about.
Later on, UH came back in the third set on positions 1 and 2 which led to a score of 3-3, and the last match to decide the winner was played on the center court. Adam, our number 3 played some amazing tennis in the third set and was able to get the deciding point for Hawaii Pacific University! After the last point, everyone started running towards Adam to celebrate the first win of the season against our island rival! What a great day to be a SHARK!
GO SHARKS!
