As the 2010 Tennessee State Closed Junior tennis tournament wound down Tuesday morning at the Champions Club, twins Samantha and Harper Caswell from Chattanooga were playing on adjacent courts for separate singles championships.
Samantha already had won the Girls’ 16s doubles title with good friend McCall Morgan, 8-2 against another local duo, Emma McCallie and Aliza Williams. Now Samantha was playing Katherine Caire, a Nashville high school junior, in the 18s singles final while her sister took on top-seeded Gabby Crofford of Franklin for the 16s championship.
The Caswells turned 15 three weeks ago and will be freshmen at Baylor School this year.
The twins’ side-by-side finals both went to 10-8 tiebreakers and finished 86 seconds apart, but the results were opposite. Samantha rallied from a 6-0 first-set loss to win 6-3, 1-0, while Harper rallied for a 6-4 win in the opening set before Crofford won 6-4, 1-0.
Harper, the No. 2 seed, was pleased to give Crofford a close match.
“She played good the whole time,” said Harper, who never has won a state closed title. “I think I had a lucky comeback in the first set, and then she pulled it out in the second.”
Her sister now has won at 10s, 12s, 14s and 18s and was the high school Division II state runner-up this past spring as an eighth-grader.
Samantha was “a little off” in her first set Tuesday, she said, acknowledging that at some point she became “ready for a new set to start, so I could do something new.”
She also admitted the rest of the match could have gone either way, so her mental stamina became important.
“When you play high school tennis as an eighth-grader, you have to toughen yourself up,” she said. “It’s not about you winning — it’s about the team winning — and you have to learn to hang in there.”
Soon after the Caswells started playing beside each other on one side of the Champions clubhouse, Chattanooga’s Chad Woodham and Hixson’s Luke Plaisted were on the other side in the Boys’ 14s and 12s singles finals, respectively.
Woodham lost 4-6, 6-2, 1-0(5) to Knoxville’s Sam Greeley, but Plaisted won 6-3, 6-2 over Andrew Morton of Johnson City after losing in the 12s doubles final with Knoxville’s Charlie Adams against Jacob Lorino of Knoxville and Jacob Marshall of Bristol.
Chattanooga pairs won the Boys’ 18s and 16s doubles titles, Alex Cooper and Aditya Rali in the older group and Bobby Brouner and Eric Roddy in the 16s. Roddy finished fourth in 16s singles, while Harrison’s Richard Gamble was third in 18s. Local players had won Boys’ and Girls’ 10s singles and Girls’ 14s and 10s doubles championships Monday.
Maggie McBrayer and Hannah Morrow finished third in Girls’ 16s doubles, giving the Chattanooga area a sweep of the top three spots.
Knoxville’s Harrison Smith edged Nashville’s Russell Anderson 1-6, 7-6(7), 1-0(9) in a splendidly waged battle for the Boys’ 18s singles title.
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