Dolphin Duo Doubles Down

By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor

When the pressure built in the third set of last Thursday’s City Individual doubles final, senior Jack Harrington didn’t flinch. He implored partner Tomas Huttepain to keep the ball in and in the end the Palisades High pair outlasted Sebastian Prokic and Shaan Londhe of Granada Hills, 7-5, 4-6, 6-4, at Balboa Sports Center in Encino.

“Credit to them—they’re a different team than the one we saw last time,” said Harrington, a Trinity College commit who finally added an individual crown to his four team titles. “This is right up there with winning nationals my junior year.”

Harrington and Huttepain  handily beat the Highlanders’ duo in the team finals two weeks prior but the rematch proved to be a different story.

“Jack told me if we didn’t win he’d break his racquet,” Huttepain  joked. “I was struggling a lot with my serve and I played passively but he said ‘Stay back and I’ll make magic happen.’”

Harrington poached to stab a forehand volley into the corner to break Prokic in the sixth game of the third set and Huttepain held to bring the Dolphins’ duo within one game of victory.

However, Londhe held serve and Harrington was broken to pull the second-seeded Granada Hills tandem within 5-4. A code violation pushed the top-seeded Palisades pair to match point inthe no-ad scoring format and Prokic double faulted on the winner-take-all deuce point to end the match.

Harrington paired with Danilo Milic to take third last year while teammates Lincoln Bellamy and Henry Lovett won the title.

Huttepain follows in the  footsteps of his older brother Diego (now a senior), who won two City doubles titles before reaching the singles final last spring, when the Dolphins achieved the tennis “triple crown” by sweeping the team, singles and doubles titles.

In last Thursday’s third-place match, Highlanders Aryan Salian and Sam Blumkin avenged a 7-5 loss in the team finals with a 6-3, 6-4 over Palisades’ Souma Hayakawa and Adam Glickman.

“I played really bad today… my legs weren’t moving at all,” Hayakawa said.

“It came down to five or six crucial points,” Glickman added.

 Having lost to runner-up Mike Mkrtchian in two tight sets in the singles semifinals, the resilient Milic rebounded to beat Maximus Catabona of Birmingham, 6-3, 6-2, in the third-place match.

    “I’d never played him before but what I try to do in those situations is figure them out in warm-up. I realized I needed to hit heavy to his backhand and use jamming serves to the body to handcuff him,” said the seventh-seeded Milic, who upset second-seeded Daniel Lin of Granada Hills in the quarterfinals. “It was very important for me to win today. I took a year and a half break. I was burned out on tennis, I didn’t practice much but I still played for the team. The key to beating Daniel [Lin] was keeping a high fighting spirit and making him work for every point. He’s one of the best guys I’ve played but that match proved to me that numbers don’t matter. Whoever has the will to win can do it. Next year I think I can accomplish more feats both in City and at Ojai.”