Both Varsity and Junior Varsity Girls Tennis teams won 1st place at the Logan Tournament on September 17, at James Logan High. The tournament is hosted there annually, and while the teams have attended this tournament before, this is the 1st time that both teams have won.

Varsity tennis captain senior Liesel Hilkemeyer said, “I was super psyched. We have not won this tournament in a really long time and we’ve been going for as long as I’ve been at Campo and we’ve always done fairly well, but we’ve never like reached this pinnacle of winning the James Logan tournament, sweeping it in fact, and it’s super exciting that both JV and Varsity won because these are some of the best teams that you go up against.”

There were 12 separate school teams at the tournament, including rival Miramonte and the previous winner of the North Coast Section Championships (NCS).

“It’s really exciting because we beat the team who won NCS last year for varsity,” said Hilkemeyer. “But basically just to sum it up, it’s crazy because it’s never been done in our coaches history at this school and it’s been quite a while.”

JV tennis captain junior Meera Phadnis attributed the JV win to the support from the sidelines. “The coaches…really hyped up the team during our cheer. That was the loudest cheer I’ve ever heard. We were screaming our hearts out. And every time someone was out playing and was having a hard match, everyone would go out and cheer for them and support them. And so it reinforced this idea that we’re all a team and the spirit of the team really came out and it made us stronger and better.”

Phadnis added, “I feel really proud. I just feel so proud of me and my team for having such a big accomplishment and a place where we haven’t ever achieved such heights before.”

Last year, Varsity came in “5th, which was the best that we’d done in a while, but this year we came in 1st [and it is the] 1st time that Sunan [Faulkner], our coach, [has] ever won James Logan, which is very exciting. We’re psyched about that,” said Hilkemeyer.

Varsity approached the preparation for the tournament differently than in past years. “We definitely started out the season a lot harder than we usually do. We had some really long practices at the beginning of the year to set our ladder up. And we played a lot against each other in our own teams, just to practice the match setting,” Hilkemeyer added. “We were ready and we were ready to win.”