by James Asher
On Saturday September 29th , Philadelphia and Washington travelled to Georgian Court to play their Annual Intercity match. Both clubs had a fantastic turnout for the event with eighteen players showing from the clubs together. With matches starting at 11am a few Philadelphia players showed up at 10am to do a mini clinic with me to get used to the court. From 11am until 6pm the court was in full force with all matches pretty competitive.
Philadelphia started the day strongly winning the first two matches 8-7 and 8-3 respectively. Washington came fighting back with Emile Toscano and Dan Sternberg storming into a 7-0 lead against James Greenley and Dick Tanfield. With the match looking over Greenley and the experienced Tanfield slowly start crawling back into the game. As Sternberg and Toscano started to lose concentration the score got to 7-7 40-40 match point. Sternberg and Toscano managed to keep their nerve to get over the line and give Washington the win 8-7. The Philadelphia teams of Straus/Broussard and Monaghan/Tanfield got Philaldelphia back on track with wins of 8-3 and 8-5 respectively.
The exhibition match was between Asher/Greenley and Philpott/Sternberg. This was a very exciting with Asher/Greenley taking an early lead only for Philpott/Sternberg to come back to take it to 7-7 40-40 in another great battle. This time Asher/Greenley fought through and got the win for Philadelphia. Philadelphia went on to win the next 3 matches to close out a fantastic day of Court Tennis with the score in matches Philadelphia 8 Washington 1.
As a side note it was great to see many Alumni from Georgian Court come to check out the game. It really provided a fantastic atmosphere and got so many people seeing the game they probably didn’t know anything about. Everyone that saw the game played were asking questions and seemed really interested so it was great to see the court being used in that way.
