Highlighting spring seniors: Boys' tennis

Seniors: Harrison Craig, Cole Creamer, Jacob Gregg, Elijah Mattingly, Ben Ondeck, Zayan Sheikh

• • •

No area team has more seniors than the Colonels and they are smarting from no opportunity to play this spring.

“It’s definitely hard,” Ondeck said. “I’ve been part of the tennis team since my sophomore year. We’ve really grown as a team and as individual players, so it’s hard not being able to showcase the skills that we’ve learned and to keep playing with the friends that I’ve made.”

Ondeck said he is especially tight with the senior group.

“We’ve kept in touch,” he said. “We’ve had lots of practice together and a lot of us have grown up in the same middle school and elementary schools for most of our lives in Winchester. It’s definitely tough not being able to see them every day.”

James Wood also had high hopes that the mix of veterans and newcomers would lead to challenging in the district race.

“We had a lot of new kids and also a lot of returning seniors,” Ondeck said. “We feel like we would have done pretty well against some of the other teams in the county.”

Ondeck said he and his teammates enjoyed match days, especially on the road.

“Definitely some of the away matches we’d have, some of the bus rides were really entertaining,” he said. “We’d listen to music or talk about what was going on in our lives. And then we would get to the match, we would all be focused and root for each other. Just the camaraderie was really special.”

Ondeck, who will attend Appalachian State, says he’ll keep playing the game thanks to his high school experience. “I’ve learned so many tennis skills and just being a team and having the kind of friendships,” he said. “Whenever I go to college, I’m looking into playing some kind of club tennis to have those kind of friendships with other people and to keep the skills going because I’ve really enjoyed playing.”