Notre Dame boys win fourth straight SEMO Conference tennis championship

For the fourth straight year, the Notre Dame Bulldogs won the SEMO Conference tennis championship.

The Bulldogs posted a team score of 24.5 to finish 15.5 points ahead of the second-place Jackson Indians on Friday at Notre Dame Regional High School.

Not only did Notre Dame win the team trophy, but they also won both the doubles and singles championships in the process.

On the doubles side, the finals featured the two Notre Dame pairs as Charlie West and Thomas Southard squared off with Blake Schreckenberg and Matthew Austin in the championship.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Southard said of playing his teammates. “Every time we play them we seem to go to a tiebreaker.”

Today was no different. Austin and Schreckenberg took the first set, but West and Southard bounced back to win the second set and send the championship match into a 10-point tiebreaker.

“I just told them to make sure they play like they aren’t playing their teammates,” Notre Dame coach Pershard Owens said. “Today they really did that.”

After West and Southard won the final point, the four converged on the middle of the court, all smiling, to shake hands and congratulate one another.

“They’re two really great players,” Southard said. “It’s a lot of fun playing them and it’s always competitive.”

Southard said playing against teammates makes things challenging in terms of strategy.

“It just makes it a lot tougher,” Southard said. “My serve normally throws a lot of people off but they knew exactly where it was going so it really changes the game.”

On the singles side, it came down to Notre Dame’s Michael Bogdanovich and Jackson’s Jeramy Essner.

Bogdanovich won the first set of the match, but after falling behind 5-4 in the second set, rallied to take a 6-5 lead.

Credit to Essner, he was able to respond and win a seven-point tiebreaker to even the match and send it into a 10-point tiebreaker for set three.

During the second match, Bogdanovich began to cramp up, visibly limiting his performance at times.

“I wasn’t playing my best,” Bogdanovich said, “but, I still won which is always nice.”

Bogdanovich took a commanding lead early in the 10-point tiebreaker as he cruised to a 10-4 win to win the match and win the singles title.

“He’s just one of those people that puts all the work in,” Bulldogs assistant coach Eli Peters said. “He plays tournaments and trains all the time. It just shows that hard work pays off because that’s what he’s been doing his whole life.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge all six teams faced was the constant wind gusts impacting each match.

“For me, it changed everything,” ​​Bogdanovich said. “My footwork was off and my swings were off as well.”

__TEAM SCORES__

Notre Dame: 24.5, Jackson: 9, Cape Central: 7, Poplar Bluff: 7, Dexter: 5, Sikeston: 4.5