Photo

Click on photo to enlarge

Submitted

The West-Oak High School girls' tennis team, seen her at Warrior Field in Westminster, captured the Western 3A region championship last month. It was the first region title for West-Oak in any sport since rejoining Western 3A last fall.

WESTMINSTER — The winning tennis teams in the Western 3A region have become like clockwork, with the girls from Daniel or Belton-Honea Path being crowned champion almost as consistently as the leaves change color around the same time.

But this year, in just its second year back in 3A, West-Oak High School decided to go ahead and change that course.

The Warriors claimed the region title in their season finale with a dramatic 4-3 victory over Daniel that saw the match come down to their second doubles team of Lacey Alexander and Katie Bradberry.

The victory capped off an 11-1 regular season, including a 7-1 mark in the region, and completed a year that, quite honestly, even the coach didn’t see coming.

“At the beginning of the year I didn’t know what to expect because this was really my first time with the girls,” first year head coach Russ Sloan said. “During the course of the summer we worked really hard to try to instill my philosophy on it, and they took to it really well, worked hard and it turned out real well for us.”

And it would have been hard to blame Sloan for not knowing exactly what he was going to get, especially with a large portion of his team playing at the high school level for the first time.

Yet, one match in the middle of the season, against B-HP, proved to the coach that his team was ready to take the torch.

The Warriors jumped out to a 3-0 lead, but ended up losing 4-3. However, the fact that West-Oak was even that competitive with a team of that caliber made a believer out of Sloan.

When West-Oak played B-HP again, it was the Warriors who came out on top. From there on out, they had the confidence to win the championship, and when it finally happened, they knew they had earned it.

“They were ecstatic,” Sloan said. “It’s a lot of hard work and effort. I started telling them after we had beaten Belton the second time that it was in our grasp. Euphoria is all I can say. It was a great season for us.”

The Warriors’ storybook season came to an end last week when they lost in the first round of the playoffs to Clinton.

But West-Oak graduates only one senior – Alexander – and with girls like Rachel McNeely, Hannah Price, Gabrielle Gibson, Nicole Harbin and Taylor Sloan returning, there is every reason to expect even more next year in Westminster.

“I would think going into the season next year we would be favored in the region,” Sloan said. “Hard to say, but we’re optimistic.”