With tryouts wrapping up and the season just around the corner, expectations for the tennis team are as high as ever. The team’s 2024 campaign was perfect, finishing with a regular season record of 18-0 for the first time in over ten years.
“It looks like a great group of guys.”
Van Hinton ’28
Given these high expectations, will the Fords be able to win their fifteenth straight Inter-Ac championship? According to the student body, the answer seems to be a hopeful yes.
Last season, the Fords lost only two Sixth Form starters, Arsh Aggarwal and Graeme Herbert, which is surprisingly low compared to most teams. The team has also added six Third Formers to varsity this year.
“It looks like a great group of guys,” Third Former Van Hinton said. “There is a lot of talent, and we are getting better at learning to play as a team every day.”
Hopefully, the addition of these young players will fill the shoes of Aggarwal and Herbert, but time will tell. As always, the tennis tryout process was a two-week-long series of challenge matches designed to narrow down the best players on the team.
“The tryouts were hard and took a lot out of me, but I think that by the end, we had a very good sense of everyone on the team’s level,” Hinton said.
Many of the stars from last year’s team enter the prime of their tennis careers and are only getting better. A lot will happen between now and the regular season, starting with a match against Wissahickon High School on March 17th. However, with the talent that Coach Tracy Tooke has assembled, the squad hopes to be Inter-Ac champions yet again.
