BY MATT STOUT
Steve Houle isn’t fooled by the score, and anyone who looks beyond it, the Manchester West girls tennis coach said, will see why.
“You look at court No. 6 (singles), which was an 8-2 match,” Houle said following his team’s 7-2 win over No. 4 Concord in the Class L quarterfinals on May 24. “That was a battle. You look at 8-2 and you say, ‘Oh, that was a kill.’ No, it wasn’t. That was an excellent tennis match and nobody gave ground.
“Everyone says, ‘How good is Concord?’” he continued. “They’re 11-2. How good are they? They’re an excellent team.”
Despite that, the year’s conclusion was all too familiar for Concord.
For the fourth straight year, and second in a row at the hands of the West, the Crimson Tide girls tennis team fell in the first round of the state tournament. Yet, the disappointment that comes with a season-ending loss couldn’t hide the best campaign Concord has had under four-year head coach Joe Proulx.
The Tide finished 11-3 after the loss to the fifth-ranked and defending champion Blue Knights; Concord defeated West earlier this season, 6-3, when it was without its No. 1 player, a victory that helped propel the Tide to the fourth seed and homecourt advantage in the quarterfinals.
And it wasn’t just the West win that stood out. Six times Concord either shut out its opponent or won, 8-1, and its only two regular-season losses came to the teams that played for the Class L championship, top-seeded Manchester Central and No. 2 Bishop Guertin.
It’s points like those Proulx said he’ll remember after he loses three seniors from his top six in Rosie Laflam, Laura Reynolds and Emily Mulligan, who played No. 2 thorugh 4, respectively.
“I can’t take anything away from the girls,” said Proulx, who last year led Concord to a 10-4 record after going 8-6 and 6-8 the previous two years. “They’re playing against an excellent team, and you have to just play in a zone big-time. You can’t say it’s a nagging loss. We knew they were going to play hard against us. I’m proud of the girls.”
Concord also boasts a slew of returning talent, starting with its No. 1 singles player, junior Maria Rouvalis; No. 2 player Elizabeth Cassidy; No. 6 player Hayley Breton – the hard-luck loser against West’s Ali Shakra – and Becky Kearney, who, with Mulligan, posted one of Concord’s two points against the Blue Knights with an 8-6 win at No. 3 doubles. Reynolds earned the other.