News 2006/08/23

The Bay Area Barracudas were denied a fourth straight trip to the national team tennis finals by the narrowest of margins.

The 14-and-under team from the Boys & Girls Club of Southwestern Oregon lost by a single game to a Bremerton, Wash., club in the Pacific Northwest Section finals on Saturday at Lake Oswego.

The five teams in the division played each other in a round robin, with each game won counting as one point. At the end of the day, B-Tac 1 of Bremerton, Wash., had 98 points and the Barracudas had 97.

“It's a tough break,” said Barracudas coach Ed Thompson, the tennis director at the William J. Sweet Memorial Tennis Center. “Sometimes it goes your way and sometimes it doesn't.”

The Barracudas actually beat the Bremerton club in their head-to-head match, 24-23.

But in the final match of the day, B-Tac 1 rallied to force a tiebreaker against another team in the last individual match, giving the Bremerton team the extra point it needed to beat the Barracudas. The Bay Area team had every tiebreaker if the squads had each finished with 97 points, including losing the fewest games of any team.

“That was kind of a heartbreaker for us,” Thompson said, though he quickly added that the Barracudas played well.

“They did a wonderful job,” he said. “The kids played well. You couldn't ask for any more effort from them. We did all that we could.”

Team members Saturday included Jon Massie, Markus Boesl, Jamey Moriarty, Colby Trull, Cara Cromwell, Callie Cromwell, Heidi Boesl and Kylee Woodman. Regular team member Brittney Wilson missed the tournament because she was at a wedding in California.

The Barracudas followed their win over B-Tac 1 by beating Davis, a squad from Vancouver, Wash., 25-20. The Bay Area team then lost to Eugene 22-19, their first loss in four matches against Eugene this year.

“They finally edged us out,” Thompson said.

In the final match, the Barracudas beat In 2 Win of Seattle 29-9, coming within one point of the maximum 30 possible points for a match.

Several members of the Barracudas will move up in age to the 18-and-under Sea Lions for next summer's team tennis series.

“We'll be a contender in that division,” Thompson said. “It just shows that we're growing. The fact that we're building up a base at the bottom to move up is the plan for development. It's starting to get there.”

Massie, Markus Boesl, Moriarty and Trull all will be moving into high school next year, another sign of the program's impact.

“The high school is going to see real seasoned players,” Thompson said.