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Poland’s Gardner peppers tennis opponents
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
Just before the final sectional tennis match of his high school career, Poland senior Garrett Gardner sat on a couch inside the Boardman Tennis Center munching on a bacon, egg and cheese bagel and sipping a Dr. Pepper.
“That’s been a ritual for me for a long time,” he said, grinning. “It’s probably the most unhealthy thing you can do, but I’ve just been drinking pop all my life and I love Dr. Pepper, so it calms me down before a match and gets me ready for game time.”
Gardner doesn’t look imposing in person — he combines Novak Djokovic’s biceps with Andre Agassi’s height, when you’d rather it be the other way around — but on paper, he’s terrifying. A two-time state qualifier and defending district champion, he’s ranked sixth in Ohio and entered Saturday’s final having fed his previous three opponents a steady diet of bagels, winning every game 6-0, 6-0.
His opponent, Lakeview senior Aaron Paczak, does look imposing, with a 6-foot-3 frame that could pass for a tight end and a lethal serve that resembles a power pitcher’s windup. After falling behind 1-0 in the opening set, Paczak held serve on his first opportunity and looked poised to give his good friend a scare.
Didn’t happen. Gardner’s biggest weapon is his consistency — “As a freshman, I’d try to pull the trigger one or two shots into a rally and blast winners, which you can’t do every time,” he said — and he spent the next 45 minutes painting more lines than the highway department.
Paczak lost the first set 6-1 and grew visibly frustrated early in the second set before regaining his composure. He lost 6-1 anyway.
“Garrett is a great player and playing him inside makes him that better,” said Paczak, who was forced indoors due to Saturday’s intermittent rain. “The better people you play, the less they’re going to mess up indoors. I wouldn’t call myself as clean of a player as Garrett, but I scrap around a little better. He just plays tennis normally a little bit better.
“He was playing really good and when someone’s hitting the lines, it’s a little bit frustrating.”
Paczak, who placed third in last year’s sectional tournament en route to earning a state berth, also may have been a little winded from his semifinal match against Ursuline’s Les Horvath, which he won 6-3, 4-6, 6-2.
“That’s the best Les has ever played against me,” he said. “I was lucky to come out with a win. He could have easily taken that.”
But after suffering a bad foot injury in the winter — he broke his ankle in a couple places, broke his heel, got a blood clot in his calf and hurt his Achilles tendon — Paczak said he was happy to still be playing.
“I’m lucky to be out on the court,” he said.
Horvath beat Poland’s Anthony Ricciardi in the consolation final, 6-1, 6-3, with all four players moving on to next week’s district tournament.
Gardner is hoping to make it to Columbus for the second straight year — he also made it as a doubles player his freshman year — but knows it only gets tougher from here.
“There’s a lot on the line,” Gardner said. “If I make it to state, great. Awesome. But as far as districts, it’s one match at a time.”
In doubles action, Warren JFK’s Tyler Cole and John Nader repeated as sectional champions, beating Cardinal Mooney’s Rich Hill and Andrew Stille 6-2, 6-2 in the championship match. Lakeview’s Eric Rohrabaugh and Zach Teffner won the third-place match over JFK’s Billy Phillips and Caelan Phillips.
“We’re a lot more comfortable this year, for some reason,” Cole said. “I feel like I’m a better player since my junior year and so is John, so we have more confidence in our game than we did last year.”
“Having to defend it [the title] really put the pressure on us,” Nader added. “Mainly we had to take our goals step by step. We defended our sectional title and now we’re going into districts and we want to improve on what we didn’t do last year. So we’re focused on taking that next step and trying to qualify for state.”
Nader and Cole won their first district match last season, then fell to a doubles team from Gates Mills Hawken in the second round.
“There’s a lot better competition at districts, so we’ve got to give it our best,” Nader said. “We’ve been there two years together so we know what to expect, but there’s always a new challenge. We’re just hoping to play our best and give it all our effort.”