MBA Retains the Venerable Vining Cup vs. McCallie

Yesterday, on a cool Saturday morn, our keenest young tennis players met on campus at 6:45am to drive together in School Bus No.1 to Sewanee, to defend our holding of the Vining Cup against our perennial rivals, McCallie.

 

Coach Bromfield was at the wheel. He had kindly brought his portable Bluetooth speaker; the hundred miles of distance flew by as the boys sang along to classic, timeless hype songs composed and performed by hard rock legends AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kiss, the Stones, and (ahem) Travis Scott.

 

On arriving at Sewanee for the big showdown, the weather was hot and dry and the sky was clear. A good day for tennis. Seeing as last year was the first time that we had ever actually beaten Coach Vining’s team (yes, the same coach who is namesake of the Vining Cup itself), the pressure was on for our boys to defend our trophy and bring it back to Nashville again.

 

Overall, I think we played a staggering total of twenty-one individual matches yesterday. Each match was first to eight games. Highlights include top singles seed Alp ‘Tweener’ Weitkamp speeding through his match to a no-nonsense 8-0 victory; Robert ‘Robohob’ Hobart chomping through his to an 8-3 conquering; Shaun ‘Silent but Deadly’ Xu walloping his at 8-2; Christopher ‘Top Drawer’ Topping 8-5; Cole ‘Ice Cole’ Anderson 8-6; and Wells ‘Well Power’ Rick 8-6, among others.

 

‘Man of the match’ award has to go to Max ‘-imum Effort’ Schlosser who came back from a dire-looking 3-6 to claw his way to 8-8. He then won the tiebreak, 7-3, to make it his overall victory 9-8. What a comeback!

 

Close behind Max as runner-up for Man of the match is Merrit ‘-ous’ MacGaw who was down something scary like 2-5 but pulled himself together, re-focused and fought his way back to 8-8. What a turnaround! Although he won the opening point of the tiebreak, he finally succumbed: overall score 8-9. Very close, and an A+ for effort. Another great lesson in never giving in.

 

Doubles match highlights include: Shaun & Charlie 8-3; Alp & Robert 8-4; Jude & Grey 8-4; Wells & Armaan 8-5.

 

Overall Vining Cup scores:

MBA: 13 - McCallie: 8