It’s hard to find positives, any silver linings, out of something as horrific as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic that began in late 2019 and exploded in 2020. But anything is possible.
And that’s exactly what has happened for a group of local tennis players known collectively as the Valley Boyz. Many of the players on the team began playing tennis then because it was one of the few sports that continued in the spring of 2020. With the player spacing and size of the court, tennis continued activity when so many other sports stopped.
Thus, the birth of the Valley Boyz, a team based at the Horne Family Tennis Center at Oglebay Park that competes at the men’s 3.0 level of the USTA Middle
States Allegheny Mountain District. After qualifying and losing at the Sectional Tournament in Princeton, NJ, the previous two years, the team went again this summer and came home with different results.
Teams representing areas anywhere from Pennsylvania to Delaware to New Jersey and West Virginia competed August 18-20 at the Veteran’s Park Tennis Complex in Princeton. The Valley Boyz won four of five matches and compiled enough match points to win the tournament and advance to the National Championship in Surprise, AZ, October 13-15.
That victory was quite the journey from when everything first started.
“During the pandemic there were a lot of things shut down, and tennis was one of the only things really you could do socially,” team captain JT Thomas said. “So there were several guys who never really played the sport before that just started playing during COVID. And that was three years ago.
“We said, ‘Well, let’s form a team.’ We formed a team and took our lumps for essentially two years. But as you know when you start anything from scratch there’s a high ceiling for improvement. So over the years we’ve gotten a lot better and this year everything kind of came together and we started handing out the lumps.”
To qualify for the Sectional Tournament the team first had to win league play. That meant competing with and defeating teams mostly from the Pittsburgh area.
When looking at the team’s roster, it may have players new, young, or inexperienced in tennis, but many have competed and excelled in other sports in the past. Competition isn’t new to them, and that provides much of the fuel for the team. The other important ingredient is how well the individual players have bonded as a team.
“It’s a group of local guys that have been playing together now for three years so there’s a very tight brotherhood and camaraderie which I think helps us when we go to play other teams,” Thomas said. “We will get on the court with these teams from Pittsburgh, and they’re just meeting each other for the first time because they’re drawing from such a larger area. We play together three-four days a week here at the Oglebay Tennis Center.
“So that in my mind helps us tremendously. Plus we spend a lot of time outside of tennis together.”
Team members primarily come from the local area but offer some diverse backgrounds. They are: Alfred Valle from Bellaire who is originally from San Jose, Costa Rica; Joe Bertagna and Zack Saxman from Pennsylvania; Paul Alig from Wheeling, a former Wheeling Park High School football player; Thomas from Wheeling, a former football, baseball and wrestler at Wheeling Central Catholic High School; Quy (King) Hoang from St. Clairsville; Wheeling father-son duo Mark and Micah Singer, Mark having played college baseball and Micah college volleyball; Bill Piko of Wheeling, former basketball player at Wheeling Park High School and Wheeling Jesuit; Chad Broadwater of Wheeling, former football player at Parkersburg High School and Shepherd University; and local tennis players Pat Trischler, Brian Vossen and PJ McDermott.
Team members have been practicing at the Oglebay Park facility, which is a Har-Tru court system that plays more like clay and is similar to the court system in Princeton. But they have added in practice and practice-matches at other locations including the Wheeling Park tennis bubble that provide a hard-court surface; the national tournament will be played on hard courts that play a little faster.
No matter the court surface, no matter the location, the Valley Boyz know what their goals are heading into the event in Arizona.
“I know most of the guys going out there, they want to try and enjoy the experience, and that’s where my mind should be,” Thomas joked. “But that’s not me. I feel like we’ve put in our time and we’ve gotten so much better that I can’t imagine that somebody is too much better than us. So I feel like we’ve got a puncher’s chance anyway.”
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