A last minute substitution proved to do no harm to Turlock High’s tennis program at last week’s Central California Athletic League tournaments, as the makeshift duo of Matteo Hernandez and Landon Tilby rallied to claim the doubles championship. They headlined a list of five Bulldogs to qualify for the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section Individual and Doubles tournaments that take place later this month.
The Bulldogs intended to go into Wednesday’s CCAL doubles tournament with a top team of Hernandez and Damian Acosta, who were the second and third top individual players for Turlock throughout the regular season. Unfortunately, Acosta was under the weather and unable to compete, paving the way for Tilby, the regular No. 5 individual, to step up at the last moment.
What happened next, as head coach Garry Harris described it, was “magic.”
Hernandez, a senior, and Tilby, a junior, won all four matches in the afternoon in straight sets to claim the doubles title, defeating team after team that consisted of regular No. 1 and No. 2 players.
They opened by sweeping Modesto’s secondary duo with a pair of 6-0 set wins. Similar dominance came in the quarterfinal against Gregori’s No. 2 doubles squad with 6-0 and 6-3 set wins. They were then met in the semifinal by familiar faces from crosstown Pitman and their top doubles team of Ryan Yamamoto and Ethan Hoftseen.
The Pride duo swept their counterparts from Enochs with a pair of 6-0 sets before taking down Turlock’s third-ranked doubles team of Peter Buie and Yaqoob Tarakhail by a 7-6 (3), 6-0 score. In the semifinal they have Hernandez and Tilby a run for their money in the opening sets, going back and forth with the Bulldogs before their rivals pulled away for a 6-4 win. Riding the momentum, Tilby and Hernandez won the match and advanced to the finals with a 6-1 set victory.
In the final, they faced the top overall group of Guri Gill and Rohan Sidhu. Again, the opening set proved to be the most difficult, with the Turlock team pulling out a 7-5 victory before cruising to a title-clinching 6-2 final set.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” Tilby said. “It was intimidating at first since I’m usually the No. 5 player and almost every other team had their top two guys, but not dropping a set through those first three matches definitely helped our confidence. We were just on fire.”
Tilby and Hernandez have been friends since elementary school, and the chemistry came naturally, despite the last minute change and the fact that Tilby has never played tennis in high school before. He previously played in youth summer leagues. Nevertheless, Harris felt as if slotting in him next to Hernandez was an easy choice.
“He's just athletic,” Harris said. “He comes from basketball, so all of that footwork definitely translates to tennis. That basketball IQ also translates to tennis, just the cutting and the movement. With Matteo who has just been so fantastic for us this season, they really meshed well.”
Tilby went 8-0 in singles play in the regular season, while Hernandez finished 7-2.
Also qualifying to sections was Turlock’s No. 2 doubles team, senior Abraham Wooley and junior Rashmeet Singh, who lost to the runner-up Eagles in an extended second set — 7-5, 7-6 (7-3) — in the semifinal round. They bounced back to clinch third place against Yamamoto and Hoftseen, dropping the first set 2-6 before rebounding with a 6-1 victory in the second set and an 11-9 win in the tiebreaker.
Joining the two doubles teams at sections will be Turlock’s top-ranked individual player Erik Peterson, who was a runner-up at Monday’s CCAL Singles Tournament. Like Hernandez and Tilby, the senior, who went 11-3 in the regular season and 9-1 in league play en route to the conference’s Most Valuable Player, didn’t drop a single set in the opening three matches.
He began with a 6-0, 6-2 win over Modesto’s Anderson Burge. He won by the same set scores against Pitman’s Derrick Orth in the quarterfinal. In the semifinal, he blanked his opponent, Guri Gill of Enochs, in straight sets. That set up a final with Gill’s teammate, Akhil Patel, who had handed Peterson his only league loss of the year back on March 20. Peterson previously bounced back against Patel on April 16, but couldn’t repeat the success in the final, losing 7-5, 6-3.
“I started off strong and kept on hitting well, but in the final, Ahkil played really well,” Peterson said. “I struggled a lot with his serve. He came off a little bit slow at the beginning, had an early lead, then he just stopped missing. He played amazing. It was a really good match.
“I’m excited to go into the playoffs and go against some really good players and get to watch our doubles players play, too. It should be fun.”
The section tournaments will take place from Monday, May 19 to Tuesday, May 20 at the Johnson Ranch Racquet Club in Roseville.
