Buchen, Borruso Come Back To Win Division IV Girls Tennis Doubles Title

Youth could have ruled the day in the doubles final of the Division IV Tennis Tournament at Shoreham-Wading River High School on Tuesday, but it was experience, instead, that won the day in the end.

Westhampton Beach senior Matilda Buchen, a Division IV, Suffolk County and New York State doubles champion from a year ago, defended her division title, partnered this time with freshman Ava Borruso, after Julia Stabile, her playing partner from season ago, graduated last spring.

Buchen and Borruso needed three sets to defeat Lillian Weiss and Luanna Carmo, seventh- and eighth-graders, respectively, at the Ross School in East Hampton, to win the division title by a score of 4-6, 7-5, 6-3.

Another young Ross School standout, freshman Lola Dangin, won the singles tournament with a 6-4, 6-2 victory over Christina Pagnozzi of Shoreham, also on Tuesday.

It was a successful tournament overall for the Hurricanes, who entered their top two singles players alongside all four doubles teams. None left a mark like Buchen and Borruso, though, who lost the first set in Tuesday’s final and were down, 5-3, at one point in the second. A strong service game from Buchen followed by a break of Weiss’s serve evened the set at 5-5. Borruso won the next service game and helped break the serve of Carmo to win the second set, 7-5, and even the match at one set apiece.

A long break before the third and final set was followed by the Ross team jumping out to a quick 2-0 lead. Later, Carmo served a winner on a deuce to put Ross up, 3-1, but it was all Westhampton Beach from that point on, as the experience of Buchen, especially, was the difference in the end.

“The girls got off to a slow start, but credit those Ross girls. They came out firing,” Westhampton Beach head coach Matt Reed said. “They weren’t any ground strokes — they were going in aggressive at the net. Even though the girls lost the first set, I liked our level of play. I just had them make some adjustments that I saw, and toward the end of the second set and into the third, I thought we picked up our level of play even more. The new strategies worked and the match started to turn into our favor.”

With the possibility of the two pairings possibly seeing one another in the Section XI Individual County Championships, which begins this Friday, October 18, at Smithtown East High School, continues the following day with round two action, and then finishes up Monday, Reed didn’t want to go into too much detail about what those new strategies were. But, ultimately, it came down to fundamentals.

“Just the basics, really — baseline consistency, loose ball errors, hitting balls long, not in good position, which led to poor footwork,” he explained. “They had to pick up a little bit. Beyond the strategy stuff, the girls were just way too inconsistent, and the Ross girls came out much more intense than we were. I thought we came out more nervous. Once we started playing our game, that’s when the match started to go our way a lot more.”

Prior to Tuesday’s final, Buchen and Borruso lost just a single game through the first four rounds of the tournament, including an impressive 6-0, 6-0 win over Emily Olesen and Sophia Kolberg, also from the Ross School, in the semifinal round on Monday.

Buchen and Borruso will be joined by another pair of doubles tandems at counties. Sophomore Zoë Grellet-Aumont and eighth-grader Gabriela Arango placed fifth in the doubles draw, while junior Diana Elliott and sophomore Maddie Montgomery placed sixth, the final county-qualifying placement. Grellet-Aumont and Arango won their first two matches of the tournament, but then fell to Weiss and Carmo, 6-1, 6-1, in the quarterfinals. Elliott and Montgomery also won two matches to advance to the quarterfinal round on Monday, which they lost, 6-0, 6-0, to their teammates, Buchen and Borruso.

Ana Way and Shannon Killoran also competed in the doubles draw for Westhampton Beach. They won their first match over East Hampton’s Dylan and Fallon Centalonza, but lost in the second round, 7-6 (7-4), 6-4, to Shoreham’s Mia Wentz and Emily Martinez.

In singles, Julia Ryvicker won her first-round match, 6-4, 6-2, over William Floyd’s Khloe DiMaio before being knocked out in the second round, 6-1, 6-1, by Izzy Mazzochi of Eastport-South Manor. Maggie Gilbride lost in the first round, losing one of the tightest matches of the day, 6-7, 7-6, 6-3, to Southampton’s Mateya Silvera.

Aside from the individual play this week, the ’Canes have some other big business to attend to — the Section XI Team Tournament. After losing the very first match of the season to a very young and strong Bayport-Blue Point, Westhampton Beach ran the table, winning the next 14 consecutive matches to finish 14-1 overall and 12-0 in League IV, leading to a top seed in the tournament.

It’s the first time under Reed the ’Canes have earned a top seed in the tournament. The girls are trying to win the county title for the first time since 2018, when that team became the first Suffolk County team ever to win the Long Island Championship. Since then, the ’Canes have placed second in the twice.

After a first-round bye, Westhampton Beach will host the winner of No. 16 Bay Shore and No. 17 West Islip on Tuesday, October 22.

“Heading into the season, half our team was new and with what was a fairly new lineup, and there was some chemistry that we needed to build,” Reed explained. “You just never know how or when that’s going to come, but after that first match, we just seemed to gel really well. We won 14 straight, including two big nonleague matches, and won against some really strong league competition in Floyd, Shoreham, East Hampton, Ross, who has a very strong team this year. The team really came together, especially the girls who were playing together for the first time.

“But our team chemistry is at an all-time high now,” he continued. “We even had couple of girls come to the match today to support Ava and Matilda in their final. The team is really clicking right now. To get that No. 1 seed in the county over teams like Hills East, Smithtown East, Floyd, means a lot, but as I told the girls, there’s a lot that comes with that No. 1 seed and it doesn’t guarantee us anything. You still have to earn everything. And with that comes expectations. So we’re just taking things one match at a time, and we’ll see what we can do.”