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LEWISTON – A season that began waiting out record-setting snow in northern Maine ended in perfection Saturday, as Caribou High School won its first state championship in boys tennis.
The Vikings completed an undefeated season by defeating perennial Western Maine power Falmouth 5-0 in the Class B final at the Wallach Tennis Complex on the campus of Bates College.
“This is great, win the states today and graduate [Sunday],” said Caribou senior third seed Casey Lancaster, who won the title-clinching match. “We’ve worked all this year and all of our lives, playing like thousands of hours of tennis, and it finally paid off.”
Caribou finished with a 16-0 record – winning each match by an identical 5-0 score for a season-long total of 80-0 – after handling a previously unbeaten Falmouth team that had won the state title two of the last three years.
But the Yachtsmen fared no better than any other opponent of the Caribou 5-0.
“It’s one thing to win Eastern Maines, but to cap it off this way is just tremendous,” said John Habeeb, the Vikings’ 21st-year head coach. If we had gone 5-0, 5-0 all season and not won today it would have been a little bit of a letdown.
“But this is something that we’ll remember forever.”
Caribou won the first set of each of the first four matches that were contested, and while the second sets were more competitive, Falmouth was able to extend only one of those to three sets.
“I knew that they were 15-0 with five individual wins in every single match,” said Falmouth coach Bob McCully. “I couldn’t judge what kind of competition that was against, not to put down anybody’s competition, I just didn’t know what to expect.
“But they played intense, they played very well, and the big points made the difference. It wasn’t that we didn’t show up, it’s just that we didn’t win the big points.”
Second seed Shane Belanger used superior backcourt play to give Caribou its first point with a 6-4, 6-0 victory over Keith Daigle.
” I love playing in the heat, it seems to bring my game to a whole new level,” said Belanger, a junior who had played first singles each of the last two years. “My spins were working amazingly well. My serve was kicking, my forehand, backhand, everything was going.”
The Vikings then clinched the championship with two victories that ended just seconds apart, as the second doubles team of senior Keegan Wakana and junior Tim Langlais defeated Chris Marchetti and Ben Moody 6-2, 7-5 before Lancaster finished off Nick Polko 6-2, 6-4.
“We started getting tight in some of those second sets,” said Habeeb, “but, boy, they hung in there and kept the faith and pulled it out. To see those two matches finish almost at the same time was just great.”
Caribou’s first doubles team of junior Taylor Jepson and senior Spencer McElwain then outlasted Chad Prichard and Jack Wyman 7-6 (7-3), 4-6, 7-6 (7-5) in the longest match of the day.
Top seed Franz Zehentner finished off the sweep, falling behind 4-1 in the first set before defeating Sam Hyland 6-4, 6-2 in a matchup of two of the top five seeds in this year’s state singles tournament.
And while the team competition had long been decided by the time Zehentner took the court, the match was not without importance. The Vikings’ unblemished individual match record was at stake, and the talented Hyland had been a state singles finalist in 2007 and a semifinalist this spring.
“At first it was easy because when I went onto the court I knew we had won the match,” said Zehentner, an Austrian exchange student, “but then the score was 4-0 and I felt the pressure just a little bit.”
It was the pressure of perfection, but just business as usual for the Caribou 5-0.
eclark@bangordailynews.net
990-8045
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